Natural Connections: Perspectives In Community-Based Conservation

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About Island Press Island Press is the only nonprofit organization in the United States whose principal purpose is the publication of books on environmental issues and natural resource management. We provide solutions-oriented information to professionals, public officials, business and community leaders, and concerned citizens who are shaping responses to environmental problems. In 1994, Island Press celebrates its tenth anniversary as the leading provider of timely and practical books that take a multidisciplinary approach to critical environmental concerns. Our growing list of titles reflects our commitment to bringing the best of an expanding body of literature to the environmental community throughout North America and the world. Support for Island Press is provided by The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Energy Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, The New-Land Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Tides Foundation, Turner Foundation, Inc., The Rockefeller Philanthropic Collaborative, Inc., and individual donors.

N AT U R A L CONNECTIONS

Natural Connections Perspectives in Community-based Conservation

Edited by David Western and R. Michael Wright Shirley C. Strum, Associate Editor

Washington, D.C. • Covelo, California

Copyright © 1994 by Island Press All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 300, Washington, DC 20009. ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics. Information regarding permission to reproduce the art of John Muafangejo appears on page xx.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Natural connections : perspectives in community-based conservation / edited by David Western and R. Michael Wright : Shirley C. Strum, associate editor. p. cm. Proceedings of a workshop held in Airlie, Va., Oct. 18–22, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-55963-345-X (cloth). — ISBN 1-55963-346-8 (paper) 1. Nature conservation—Citizen participation—Congresses. 2. Ecosystem management—Citizen participation—Congresses. I. Western, David. II. Wright, R. Michael. III. Strum, Shirley C. (Shirley Carol), 1947– . QH75.A1N337 1994 94-38977 333.72—dc20 CIP

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America 10

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Contents

Preface

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xiii

Acknowledgments

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Note to the Reader

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The Background to Community-based Conservation David Western and R. Michael Wright

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Part I Case Studies

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Ecosystem Conservation and Rural Development: The Case of Amboseli David Western 15

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Transforming Customary Law and Coastal Management Practices in the Maluku Islands, Indonesia, 1870–1992 Charles Zerner 80

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Managing Wildlife with Local Communities in the Peruvian Amazon: The Case of the Reserva Comunal Tamshiyacu-Tahuayo Richard E. Bodmer 113

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Kakadu National Park: An Australian Experience in Comanagement M. A. Hill and A. J. Press

The Resurgence of Community Forest Management in Eastern India Mark Poffenberger

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CONTENTS

Part II Case Study Profiles

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The Zimbabwe Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) Simon Metcalfe

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Local Initiatives and the Rewards for Biodiversity Conservation: Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, Papua New Guinea Mary C. Pearl

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BOSCOSA: Forest Conservation and Management through Local Institutions (Costa Rica) Richard Donovan

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Profile of National Policy: Natural Forest Management in Niger Jonathan Otto and Kent Elbow

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A Profile and Interim Assessment of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project, Nepal Michael P. Wells

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The Farm Scheme of North York Moors National Park, United Kingdom Derek C. Statham

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Community-based Approaches to Wildlife Conservation in Neotropical Forests John G. Robinson and Kent H. Redford

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CONTENTS

Part III Themes

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Cultural Traditions and Community-based Conservation Charles D. Kleymeyer

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The Link Between Local Participation and Improved Conservation: A Review of Issues and Experiences Peter D. Little 347

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Tenurial Rights and Community-based Conservation Owen J. Lynch and Janis B. Alcorn

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Community Environmental Action: The National Policy Context Fabio Feldmann

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The Role of Institutions in Community-based Conservation Marshall W. Murphree 403

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Economic Dimensions of Community-based Conservation Daniel W. Bromley 428

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Ecological Limits and Opportunities for Community-based Conservation Nick Salafsky

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Are Successful Community-based Conservation Projects Designed or Discovered? Frances J. Seymour

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CONTENTS

Part IV The Workshop

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Linking Conservation and Community Aspirations David Western

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Lessons Learned Shirley C. Strum

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Recommendations R. Michael Wright

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A Few Big Challenges David Western, Shirley C. Strum, D. Tuzin, K. Sayre, and R. Michael Wright

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Visions of the Future: The New Focus of Conservation David Western

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Participants Index

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Preface

Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-based Conservation is the proceedings of a workshop on community-based conservation held in Airlie, Virginia, from October 18–22, 1993. Both the origins and the outcome of the workshop need some explanation if the collaborative effort that went into the creation of this book is to be fully appreciated. The workshop began to take shape in the unlikely setting of 650 Fifth Avenue, New York City, during a board meeting of the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation (LCAOF). The foundation’s meetings are always about conservation directions and philosophy as much as they are about projects and budgets. The meeting on April 24, 1991, was typical except in one respect: The directors—Art Ortenberg, Liz Claiborne, David Quammen, and David Western—and the program manager, Jim Murtaugh, all felt more than usually excited about the community-based direction conservation was taking and troubled by the failure of projects to live up to their promise. Proposal after proposal alluded to the need to reconcile human needs and conservation at the local level. The words were there—local participation, empowerment, tangible benefits, sustainable development —but, somewhere along the line, most programs either failed to come to grips with the human dimension or failed to tackle conservation issues. Why did some projects fail despite a surfeit of funds and personnel, while a few succeeded on next to nothing? As the foundation pumped conservation organizations for details, a few salient lessons surfaced. Most organizations appeared to pay lip service to the goal of involving local communities in conservation but, in reality, went about their business as usual. Projects tended to be short term in nature and overreliant on expatriate expertise; those involved seemed disinclined to work through or build up local institutions in the developing world. Most personnel had not resolved the problem of building local sustainability into their projects. Most also had no clear criteria through which to determine whether local people did benefit from conservation or whether conservation did better for having involved local people. LCAOF decided the time was ripe to draw together a wide range of conservation-minded people to review success and failure in community-based projects and ask for their advice on the way ahead. The first workshop planning session, convened by the LCAOF board, took place in Washington, D.C., on November 14, 1991, with representatives of the World Bank, USAID, Wildlife Conservation International, World Resources Institute, World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International in attendance. The Nature Conservancy joined in the meetings that followed during the next year. Once the size and scope of the endeavor xiii

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became apparent, LCAOF contracted Michael Wright, senior vice president of World Wildlife Fund, to coordinate workshop planning activities. In keeping with the spirit of community-based conservation, the planning group envisaged a participatory approach to the workshop from the outset. The first step involved choosing fifteen case studies from a long list recommended by members of the planning group. The final selection was intended to provide workshop participants with a sample of community-based conservation activities from around the world, as well as a common set of materials for evaluation and discussion. The second step entailed identification of common themes that cut across the case studies, for which analyses would be commissioned. Case study authors contributed suggestions of their own. The planning group and outside reviewers contacted by Michael Wright suggested theme authors once the topics had been selected. Each theme author was to review the case studies and other relevant materials and to draw out broad conclusions for the workshop participants. A few months prior to the workshop, once the need for a synthesis of the issues became obvious, a final background document was commissioned. David Western and Michael Wright, with input from the LCAOF board and program manager, sifted through the case studies and theme papers to draw out the key points and lay out a logical structure for the workshop discussions. Once the background materials were under way, the planning group drew up a list of prospective workshop participants. Suggestions included a cross section of landowners, resource managers, government agencies, conservation organizations, international donors, development agencies, and a variety of specialists involved in community-based conservation. The final selection of sixty participants, based on geographical coverage and a balance of interests, was heavily biased toward those with firsthand experience. The case studies were circulated to all participants three months prior to the workshop, followed by the theme papers six weeks later and then by the issues paper. Each participant was asked to review the case studies and theme papers and recommend topics for discussion. Their suggestions were reviewed and incorporated into the workshop agenda. The workshop was staged at Airlie House, set in the superb fall colors of Virginia. The participants from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and North America included indigenous peoples, politicians, anthropologists, game wardens, forest managers, scholars, and conservationists. The group could not have been more mixed or more steeped in the issues. This book follows the structure of the workshop. The case studies, theme papers, and issues paper gave each participant a common set of documents to stimulate their thinking prior to arrival at Airlie. At the workshop, paticipants reviewed the linkages between conservation and local community interests. The group then split into parallel groups to examine the lessons contained in each major theme, identify areas of uncertainty, and draw up recommendations. The groups later reconvened to compare notes and draw out common threads. They

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then split once more into working groups for Asia and the Pacific region, Africa, Latin America, and the Developed World. Each regional group reviewed the findings from the earlier sessions and defined its own priorities and agenda. Two additional groups met to outline the role of donor agencies and suggest the most appropriate methods for skills and technology transfer. The final plenary session reviewed the workshop proceedings, drew responses from the participants, and mapped out a series of regional follow-up activities. On the final morning, Bruce Babbitt, United States Secretary of the Interior, met with the entire group over breakfast and gave a thoughtful talk on the politics of community-based conservation. The Airlie House workshop captured the excitement of community-based conservation in its formative stages. The atmosphere was charged with expectation, indignation, anger, fire, compassion, and humor. With so many different faces, cultures, voices, and experiences—so many individuals all eager to fill the void between people and nature—drawn together in one place, the workshop took on a life of its own, to everyone’s surprise and delight. No one came knowing what to expect; no one left disappointed. Something unique happened at Airlie—something beyond words, recommendations, resolutions. Perhaps it is best described as a vision of a new conservation. That vision and its accompanying spirit have been elegantly captured in the foundation’s summary of the workshop, “The View from Airlie: Community-based Conservation in Perspective” (1994). The workshop proceedings presented here draw on the background materials and the discussions at Airlie House. Four case studies have been dropped, and an additional theme paper on economics has been added. The issues paper has been rewritten and divided between chapters 1 and 22 to better fit the information to the book’s format. The outcome of the Airlie meeting, presented in Part IV, summarizes the workshop discussions. We have added some material for the sake of completeness and fleshed out the text to make the proceedings as readable as possible. Above all, we have tried to transmit, as truly as possible, the voices, the excitement, and the hopes of Airlie.

Acknowledgments The Airlie House Community Based Conservation Workshop—the proceedings of which comprise this volume—would not have been possible without the personal, passionate conviction and leadership of Art Ortenberg and Liz Claiborne and the foundation that bears their names. In addition, the editors owe a particular debt of gratitude to the sixty participants from throughout the world whose insight and candor during the October 1993 workshop broadened our understanding and deepened our conviction regarding the role of communities in managing our biosphere. The workshop was their product, and so too are these proceedings. James Murtaugh and Ellen Trama, respectively the program officer and program assistant of the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation, ably coordinated and handled the complex logistics of the workshop. Each case study was reviewed by at least two reviewers whose efforts are most appreciated but who, by prior agreement, must remain anonymous. We most appreciate the support of Island Press in preparing this volume and the editing of Lisa Lawley, without which this would be a less literate effort. We are grateful also to Silicon Graphics for help with the design. Finally, we wish to thank U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, whose remarks on the closing day of the workshop linked the concerns of communities throughout the world with those of rural areas in the United States. In addition, David Western would like to thank the Wildlife Conservation Society for supporting his efforts in preparation for the workshop and Zippy Wanakuta for her support in its aftermath. Michael Wright wishes to thank the World Wildlife Fund and The Nature Conservancy for their support and Hilary Barbour for her assistance from the inception of this project.

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Note to the Reader The ideas in this book, particularly those related to the themes discussed in Part III, have been extensively cross-referenced in order to make them as accessible as possible. For ease of reading, each chapter therefore has been assigned a shortened name, derived, whenever possible, from the full chapter title. For instance, Chapter 6, “Kakadu National Park: An Australian Experience in Comanagement,” has been shortened to KAKADU , and Chapter 14, “Cultural Traditions and Community-based Conservation,” is referred to as CUL TURE for cross-referencing purposes. To make locating cross-referenced materials as effortless as possible, these shortened titles also appear as the running heads at the top of each right-hand page within their respective chapters. For quick reference, a complete listing of these shortened chapter titles follows:

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13

BACKGROUND AMBOSELI INDIA MALUKU ISLANDS AMAZON KAKADU CAMPFIRE CRATER MOUNTAIN BOSCOSA NIGER ANNAPURNA NORTH YORK MOORS NEOTROPICAL FORESTS

Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26

CULTURE PARTICIPATION TENURE POLICY INSTITUTIONS ECONOMICS ECOLOGY INITIATION LINKAGE LESSONS LEARNED RECOMMENDATIONS CHALLENGES THE FUTURE

xix

Grateful acknowledgment is expressed to the John Muafangejo Trust for permission to reproduce the linocuts found on the opening pages of Chapters 1 and 14 –26. Following are their titles in order of appearance: Thinking Man (1986); He Is Killing an Ox to Collect the Corn (1987); A Good Femily in Ovambo (1985); An Interview of Cape Town University in 1971 (1971); A Jealousy Man (1976); Muafangejo’s Kraal (1979); Men Are Working in Town (1981); An Ark Noah (1979); A Beautiful Ovamboland (1984); A Man Is Hunting an Eland (1974); Shiyane Home (1969); Kuyanjama Kings. Manduma Has Assagal (1983); Lions Are Wanting the Two Boys up the Tree (1985); and Hope and Optimism. In Spite of the Present Difficulties (1984). These illustrations (©1992 by John Muafangejo Trust) were reproduced from The African Dream by Orde Levinson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992).

CHAPTER 1

The Background to Community-based Conservation David Western and R. Michael Wright

The focus of conservation concern and debate has changed throughout history in response to new problems, concerns, and knowledge. One approach, newly emergent, is community-based conservation, or CBC. Community-based conservation arises from within the community—or at least at the community level—rather than internationally or nationally. The irony, of course, is that community-based conservation is hardly new. Communities down the millennia have developed elaborate rituals and practices to limit offtake levels, restrict access to critical resources, and distribute harvests (Croll and Parkin 1992).

Conservation in History Traditional conservation practices revolved around sustaining food supplies such as fruiting trees or wildlife or protecting cultural symbols, whether totemic animals or religious sites. Conservation, in other words, originated in prehistory as practices that satisfied human needs, not as an altruistic concern for animals and plants. Despite the conservation practices of ancient times, as early as the Paleolithic period of the Stone Age the survival of the wild had more to do with low human population density, limited technology, and undeveloped or restricted markets than with self-imposed human restraint. When resources ran out, new lands for human habitation were always available. Moving on in pursuit of fresh resources remained an option during the early Neolithic, even as pastoralism and shifting agriculture emerged. Movement, whether nomadic, transhumant, or wholesale relocation, enabled humans to optimize resource use and sidestep the consequences of overexploitation. Movement didn’t entirely obviate the need for conservation or inhibit compassion for other forms of life. Evidence from contemporary traditional societies suggests that a holistic sense of the world was common to most cultures. Many cultures and religions (including the faiths of Hindus, Buddhists, and native 1

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Americans) still retain a strong sense of the indivisibility of humanity and nature (Kemf 1993). Where space was lacking and prey species had evolved in isolation from humans, conservation practices often were ineffective. Evidence from oceanic islands, for example, shows a sharp rise in extinction rates with the arrival of seafaring peoples (Olson 1989). Large-mammal exterminations in the New World during the Pleistocene bear evidence of overkill by early hunters (Martin and Klein 1984). Indeed, traditional conservation practices probably evolved more to maximize and allocate harvests than to conserve supplies (see MALUKU ISLANDS). Moreover, many traditional societies, given modern weapons, overhunt their prey, as discussed in NEOTROPICAL FORESTS. Traditional conservation beliefs, in other words, are not ready-made prescriptions for today’s world.

The Rise of Modern Conservation Populations expanded and grew more sedentary during the Neolithic. Historical evidence points to localized resource depletion and abandonment of agrarian and urban centers as early as 3000 B.C. (Southwick 1976). In classical Greece, Aristotle and Plato wrote almost as persuasively as the twentieth century’s Aldo Leopold about landscapes withering under the onslaught of livestock. “What now remains compared with what then existed,” Plato noted, “is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having been wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left” (Rodes and Odell 1992). By pharaonic times, wildlife was scarce in Lower Egypt. The ruling elite there established the first recorded wildlife reserves in order to assure themselves of quarry on hunting expeditions. A similar devastation of wildlife was repeated across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe as populations grew, settled, and transformed the natural landscape for arable farming, husbandry, and forestry. The same issues arose time and again with each cycle of settlement and resource depletion: Who owns wildlife? Who owns the forest? Who owns the land? The aristocracy almost invariably won such disputes and denied the peasants who lived on their land or around royal hunting preserves access to wildlife (Thomas 1983). Disputes over forest land and products were particularly contentious, culminating in the rise of forestry practices in eighteenth-century Europe (Nash 1967) and the first forest conservancies, established by the British Raj in India during the mid-nineteenth century (Vedant 1986). By the 1850s, a new conservation sensibility emerged alongside the romantic movement in Europe and the United States (Nash 1967; Thomas 1983). Humanitarian concerns for the poor, the enslaved, and the disenfranchised soon spilled over into demands for ethical treatment of animals. By 1869, expanding sensibilities led John Stuart Mill to advocate the preservation of species for their own sake, independent of their utility for humans (Thomas 1983). The rise of a modern conservation consciousness and conscience gathered mo-

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mentum in the late nineteenth century, as the wilds disappeared and rural communities became urban. Forest reserves, national parks, and hunting laws familiar to twentieth-century conservationists came into being, although nineteenth-century motives were decidedly more political and utilitarian than preservationist. The question of who owned wildlife and who had the right to shoot it, for example, intensified and became closely tied to egalitarianism in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Europe (Tober 1981). Early national parks mostly were intended to save natural monuments and open space for recreation rather than to preserve vignettes of nature (Runte 1979). Sustainable use nevertheless was the best way to preserve nature, according to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pinchot, the self-proclaimed founder of American conservation, advocated efficiency and prudence in the profitable and sustainable use of natural resources. Conservation, in this new doctrine, was “the application of common sense to the common problems for the common good” (Shabecoff 1993). Stripped of its rhetoric, Pinchot’s sustainable-use policy signaled President Roosevelt’s intention to restrain big businesses’ abuse of public lands. The sustainable-use doctrine also lent legitimacy to efforts to conserve land for the public good. The movement gained an aura of scientific respectability in later years, when mathematical population models were used to calculate maximum sustained yields for natural-resource harvests (Holt and Talbot 1978). But the very pragmatism of Pinchot’s wise-use conservation proved abhorrent to the spiritualists and romantics led by preservationist John Muir. The first salvo signaling a deep rift in the conservation movement was about to be fired.

The Diversification of Conservation The standoff first arose over plans to dam and flood Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park to provide water for San Francisco. Roosevelt and Pinchot came down on the side of exploitation and Muir on the side of preservation. The gap between pragmatists and preservationists widened after World War II, when the archdruid of modern preservationism, David Brower, assumed the directorship of Muir’s Sierra Club and opposed dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon (Shabecoff 1993). In later years, the split widened further when the animal rights and deep ecology movements surfaced and began to champion the interests of species and nature on ethical and moral grounds (Nash 1989). The preservationists had reason to be skeptical. Impressive as early conservation successes had been in the United States, powerful commercial counterforces waged war on the preservationists. These forces were behind the introduction of laws and policies that encouraged, mandated, and often subsidized the private exploitation of public water, land, timber, minerals, and fisheries (Wilkinson 1992). The underlying goals, which foreshadowed similar resource policies elsewhere, were to boost the United States’ national economy, encourage settlement, and

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strengthen international trade. Once the forces of utilization were unleashed, however, they ran on, blind to ecological limits and environmental destruction. In many other cases, society’s ability to sustainably manage living resources ranging from wild species in the Peruvian rain forest (see AMAZON) to trochus shells in Indonesia (see MALUKU ISLANDS) also has proved illusory (Talbot 1993). Preservationists scored victories in 1908, with the introduction of the wildlife refuge system in the United States, and with the establishment of a series of game reserves and parks in Africa at much the same time. In the developing world, conservation by and large became the state’s responsibility, both during and after the colonial era. State policies and legislation both regulating the use of natural resources and protecting nature continued apace, however, throughout the early part of the twentieth century as population and commerce burgeoned. The rationale echoed those common to Britain’s Indian conservancies and Roosevelt’s national forests: commercialism and local interests were said to cause environmental destruction inimical to the state. Using this well-honed argument, governments intervened time and again to secure land and resources in the larger interest of society. State land ownership and conservation became unquestioned norms, whether or not they were called for or worked. Renewable-resource use and preservation have served the environment well, but neither approach has proved sufficient. Both often have fared badly in the face of population growth, poverty, and commercialism. At one extreme, international forces such as trade and economic incentives undermine conservation efforts. At the other, government indifference and incompetence—often intensified by commercial greed, nepotism, corruption, and local hostility—have swelled the tide of destruction. Finally, both utilization and preservation policies falter wherever land tenure and access rights are ill defined. The problem is most acute in areas where national policies deprive local communities of the right to use the resources on their own land. The resulting us-versus-them rush to harvest is the root of resource depletion. The weaknesses in Pinchot’s and Muir’s philosophies raise the question of whether prevailing policies, which isolate the interests of local communities from those of the state, are the only or even the best ways to go about conservation. A countertrend, based on the belief that local participation in decisions and benefits could reduce hostility toward conservation efforts, began to emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s (see AMBOSELI). The resulting first small steps in the direction of community participation in conservation were hastened by several developments.

Prelude to Community-based Conservation The first development involved mounting threats to the environment in the face of careless technology, consumerism, and the population explosion. Rachel Carson’s

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Silent Spring (1962) and the Ehrlichs’ Population Bomb (1968) alerted the public to these threats. Earth Day 1970 made environment a household word in much of the world, and the surrounding issues later gained political recognition through the United Nations Conference on the Global Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. Recognition paid off: International conservation conventions mushroomed in the years that followed. Despite some progress, conservation efforts still revolved around saving highprofile species and habitats. This was to change in the next decade, once the oil crises instilled conservation in Western consciousness and conservationists broadened their horizons to encompass biodiversity and biological processes (IUCN, UNEP, and WWF 1980). Conservation’s expanded horizons stretched far beyond parks onto rural lands, where the ultimate threat to biodiversity lay. Just how conservation was to be tackled in rural areas was an issue that remained disturbingly vague, invoking the aspirations of future generations while ignoring the problems of the rural poor (Western 1984). The second precipitating factor involved grass-roots development. The centrally planned, capital-intensive aid projects begun in the 1950s and based on both altruism and self-interest had done little to alleviate poverty and income disparity in the developing world, despite the grandiose dams, irrigation projects, power stations, roads, and industrial developments that resulted. Integrated rural development (IRD) projects became fashionable but, again, failed with disconcerting regularity. The causes included continued centralization of planning and overly ambitious projects. The grass-roots approach, in contrast, focused on participation and local aspirations (Chambers 1983). To a significant degree, small-scale projects based on resource use did emerge during this period, thus laying a foundation of experience for community-based conservation. The grass-roots approach recognized rural communities’ dependence on sustainable use of natural resources such as soil, water, grazing land, forest products, and wildlife. This recognition conceded the case long made by the Pinchot school. What had been missing in Pinchot’s approach, according to rural sociologists, was a local say and stake in resource use. Free to define their own priorities, local communities, in theory, would develop at their own pace and in their own way. They would learn their own lessons and build up their own skills in everything from health care and education to water management and communal forestry (Uphoff 1985). Grass-roots development was not an unqualified success. The 1970s oil crisis, in particular, put severe economic strain on developing countries. Recently, however, the grass-roots approach has matured and come to play an ever larger role in development programs around the world (Durning 1989; Hirschmann 1993). The third precipitating factor involved the human rights and indigenous peoples movements. Both drew attention to disenfranchised rural communities such as the Yanomami in Brazil and the Aboriginals of Australia (Berger 1979; Miller

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1993). Internationally, developing countries’ claims of North-South inequality led to demands for a new world economic order based on redistribution of wealth. Radical grass-roots organizations promoted populist movements as an alternative to government assistance (Hellinger, Hellinger, and O’Regan 1988). As a result, groups that linked social justice for ethnic minorities with environmental health became increasingly vocal.

Environmentalism and Democracy The upshot of these convergent developments was a heightened sensibility about the environment and the interests of local people. A shift away from the elitism that had dogged the largely urban and Western preservation movement finally was under way. As much as anything, the shift acknowledged the fact that the fate of most of the earth’s biological diversity lay in the hands of poor people in the Third World. Conservation and development no longer were John Muir’s irreconcilable forces on either side of the divide. In a startling turnaround from the protectionism of earlier conventions, the theme of the Third World Parks Congress of 1982 was CONSERVATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. The published proceedings drew on a handful of case studies to show how protected areas could contribute to human welfare and increase security in the process (McNeely and Miller 1984). The emphasis was still decidedly on buffering parks, but the move from preservation to multiple use of protected areas was clearly under way. By the mid-1980s, conservation took on new urgency as environmental degradation accelerated and ecologists’ warnings of impending mass extinctions captured public attention. Chernobyl, confirmation of greenhouse warming, and the development of a hole in the ozone over the Antarctic left no doubt about the connection between consumer habits and the state of the environment. The heightened awareness created fertile ground for economic development in a greener shade. The World Commission on Environment and Development’s (1987) Our Common Future—or the Brundtland Report, as it became known—brought political respectability to the marriage of ecology and economics. The link was not simply academic; neither was it lost on politicians confronted with public demands for clean air and water, curbs on insecticides and pesticides, and a halt to whaling and tropical-forest destruction. Several other events presaged a sharp turn toward local participation and ruralbased conservation during the last decade. The end of the Cold War provided perhaps the biggest fillip to environmental issues and conservation. The environment and sustainable development quickly assumed high priority on the international agenda, culminating in the United Nations-sponsored Earth Summit. The summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, drew together 120 heads of state to discuss the state of the environment. Calls for democratization and liberalization, spurred by the collapse of commu-

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nism, also triggered demands for equitable resource allocation and a local voice in conservation. Centralized control over conservation and natural resources, tightened over decades, began to loosen. Regional and local autonomy took hold—although not without their own weaknesses. Yet another significant shift was the new emphasis on biodiversity and bioethics. Demonstrations of the strategic value of biodiversity, for example, added weight to the argument for sustainable development advocated in the Brundtland Report. The animal rights movement, with a voice grown powerful in calls for whaling and ivory trade bans, developed its own strong following. Both approaches, unfortunately, also deepened tensions and disagreements over conservation, particularly between rich and poor nations. At the root of these tensions are two opposing rights: the right of communities to assume control over their land and resources, and the right of outsiders to deny them the use of species and resources. One force of liberalization is pushing for community rights; the other, as in the case of the animal rights movement, calls for even more stringent controls. New terms such as ecotourism, green economics, intergenerational equity, debtfor-nature swaps, green consumerism, and people-based conservation sprang up, tracking the shifting environmental sensibilities. Out of this ferment of concern and flurry of activity has arisen the ill-defined concept called community-based conservation. In community-based conservation, the emphasis has moved from the top to the bottom, from the center to the periphery, from the elite to the poor, and from the urban to the rural. The shift has opened the door on the biggest conservation challenge of all: how to deal with the vast majority of the earth’s surface, where there are no parks and where the interests of local communities prevail.

A Shift in Focus: Community-based Conservation Community-based conservation includes, at one extreme, buffer-zone protection of parks and reserves and, at the other, natural resources use and biodiversity conservation in rural areas. The term covers both new and traditional conservation methods, as well as conservation efforts that originate within or outside a community, so long as the outcome benefits the community. Community-based conservation reverses top-down, center-driven conservation by focusing on the people who bear the costs of conservation. In the broadest sense, then, community-based conservation includes natural resources or biodiversity protection by, for, and with the local community (see INSTITUTIONS). The deeper agenda, for most conservationists, is to make nature and natural products meaningful to rural communities. As far as local communities are concerned, the agenda is to regain control over natural resources and, through conservation practices, improve their economic well-being.

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Defining community-based conservation any more precisely would be futile and even counterproductive. As the case studies demonstrate, community-based conservation intentionally includes a range of activities practiced in various corners of the world that directly or indirectly lead to conservation. The coexistence of people and nature, as distinct from protectionism and the segregation of people and nature, is its central precept. If community-based conservation can not be defined simply, detailed case studies from around the world at least can convey a sense of what it entails. But gauging the strengths and weaknesses of this new and growing emphasis in conservation requires a further step: an appreciation of the very diversity encapsulated within the many approaches to community-based conservation. The disagreements on definition, too, are significant in themselves. Both diversity and disagreements draw attention to the many actors involved and to the reasons why they see things differently. The broad meanings of community and conservation also make communitybased conservation hard to pin down. Should community be defined by ethnicity or traditions, by the length of a group’s residency, or by a sense of common purpose? Or, given the great flux and transition in most societies—the global village in the making—is community best defined by geographical and conservation context? Community, in this case, would have to include immigrants, cultures in transition, and those with no ancestral ties to the land or to each other. As development professionals have discovered (see PARTICIPATION), even traditional communities are rife with internal conflicts and divergent interests and often split along economic, gender, and social lines. And what of conservation? Does this term exclusively connote the preservation of pristine natural ecosystems and species, as many preservationists argue? If so, few areas today qualify for conservation; fewer still have escaped humankind’s imprint at some point in the intervening ages since the Pleistocene. Is conservation about the right of any and all species to find a living space on this overcrowded planet? Is it, more broadly yet, about maintaining the diversity of life, albeit modified by humanity? Or, more vitally, is it about the global ecological processes that sustain natural resources and the environment and, ultimately, our physical and emotional well-being? The meaning of community varies with context, just as perceptions of nature vary around the world (see CULTURE). Cultural views, attitudes, and values are no less varied than biodiversity and defy a unified ethic of the natural world (see CHALLENGES). Simply sticking a label on locally based efforts does not create a new field of conservation. Community-based conservation is growing of its own accord, despite the obstacles. What is most needed is recognition of a neglected set of participants and acknowledgment of the rural landscape’s significance in conservation. Above all, the opportunities and challenges of community-based conservation need to be explored and encouraged.

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The Potential of Community-based Conservation Fortunately, a loose definition of community-based conservation does not preclude exploration of its potential or the challenges it poses. Clearly, communitybased conservation is essentially about the locus of action. The locus may define the place but not necessarily the opportunities or what is at stake. Community efforts open up the bulk of the earth’s landscape, often written off as ecologically sterile and hopeless for conservation. Ecologists and conservationists have only just begun to turn their attention to rural areas and seriously examine (or, more correctly, rediscover) the options for coexistence. If these efforts succeed, biological losses will be minimized, and protected areas will become less important (Western 1989). At stake is nothing less than the fate of the natural world and its resources. In rural areas, humankind has the chance to value land, live within it sustainably, and learn how to coexist with nature. The alternative is a biologically and physically degraded world. Overexploitation will lower the productivity of ecosystems and the self-replenishing capacity of soil, water, and atmosphere. The stability of planetary processes will be at risk. Nature will be reduced and confined to hypermanaged ecological islands and megazoos. The eight thousand or so protected areas that currently cover 4 percent of the earth’s surface form a vital biological storehouse, but even if their area were doubled, the storehouse would be unable to prevent mass extinctions. Habitat fragmentation, ecological isolation, edge effects, poaching, and other forces will greatly impoverish these isolated biological islands. If nothing else, community-based conservation can help buffer protected areas from ecological impoverishment. A bigger opportunity by far lies in conserving and using the bulk of rural land productively and sustainably for its inhabitants, stemming the loss of biological wealth that necessitates protected areas (Western 1989).

The Uncertainties We must avoid simple prescriptions and romantic illusions of returning to a lesscomplicated bucolic past in tackling community-based conservation. We must also avoid the pitfalls of integrated planning (IRD), in which overly ambitious goals and timetables and heavy dependence on outside expertise for specialist skills undercut indigenous administrative institutions (Lewis and Carter 1993). Enormous obstacles block the potential for conservation in the rural landscape. The breakdown of traditional societies, population and commercial pressures, nepotism, corruption, and lack of awareness, knowledge, skills, and enforcement are only a few examples. Perhaps the greatest obstacle lies in the parochialism of communities and the difficulties they face in conceding the rights and interests of other communities. Furthermore, no community today stands alone. In some cases, communities

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share resources such as the Pacific salmon or the Serengeti wildebeest. Others find that common interests arise indirectly, for example, over the impact of deforestation on river flows. Every community now depends on outside markets and is therefore subject to the vagaries of pricing policies and marketing structures outside its control. Community-based conservation, under these circumstances, is not simply a question of recognizing the rights of local communities and landowners to use resources. In the absence of a sense of responsibility to society and the appropriate management capacity, devolving to local communities the right to use resources carries the risk of even worse destruction. Given the risks and uncertainties, can governments realistically abrogate their responsibilities to society in the interest of devolving proprietary rights to local communities and individuals? This raises the difficult question of which right is more fundamental: that of the community or that of society? Does this mean, then, that responsibilities and capabilities should be linked to rights to use and manage natural resources? All three factors—rights, responsibilities, and capabilities—were once more or less internalized within traditional communities and imposed by resource limitations. The integrity and interrelatedness of these factors broke down once local communities entered a larger constellation of communities within nation states and, more recently, a global community of nations. While community-based conservation and talk of the new conservation paradigm have engendered a rush of optimism, the troubling question of whether communities actually can resolve resource conflicts and slow environmental degradation better than a centralized authority remains (Wells and Brandon 1992). The scale and complexity of environmental problems is far greater today than anything traditional communities ever had to deal with. Even where cultural institutions are still intact, poverty, commerce, and politics play havoc with them. The chapters that follow take a hard look at community-based conservation in order to shed light on its strengths and weaknesses. Parts I and II present case studies from around the world. Part III is concerned with the urgent themes that arise from the case studies. The chapters in Part IV present the conclusions of the Airlie House workshop and convey a sense of the common ground and differences that emerged from discussion among the diverse participants. The final chapter, “Visions of the Future: The New Focus of Conservation,” speculates on the future of conservation in the rural landscape. SOURCES Berger, J., ed. 1979. Indigenous Peoples: A Global Quest for Justice. Report for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues. London: Zed Books. Carson, R. 1963. Silent Spring. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton-Mifflin. Chambers, R. 1983. Rural Development: Putting the Last First. London: Longman.

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Croll, E., and D. Parkin, eds. 1992. Bush Base: Forest Farm, Culture, Environment and Development. London:Routledge. Durning, A. 1989. Action at the Grassroots: Fighting Poverty and Environmental Decline. Worldwatch Paper 88. Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute. Ehrlich, P. R., and A. H. Ehrlich. 1968. The Population Bomb. Maltituck, New York: Amereon. Hellinger, S., D. Hellinger, and F. O’Regan. 1988. Aid for Just Development: Report on the Future of Foreign Assistance. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner. Hirschmann, A. 1993. Getting Ahead Collectively: Grassroots Experences in Latin America. New York: Pergamon Press. Holt, S. J., and L. M. Talbot. 1978. “New Principles for the Conservation of Wild Living Resources.” Wildlife Monograph No. 59. Supplement to Journal of Wildlife Management 43(2):1–33. International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, the United Nations Environment Program, and World Wildlife Fund (IUCN, UNEP, and WWF). 1980. World Conservation Strategy. Washington, D.C.: IUCN, UNEP, and WWF. Kemf, E., ed. 1993. The Law of the Mother. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Lewis, D., and N. Carter, eds. 1993. Voices from Africa: Local Perspectives on Conservation. Washington, D.C.: World Wildlife Fund. Martin, P. S., and R. G. Klein, eds. 1984. Quarternary Extinctions: A Prehistoric Revolution. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press. McNeely, J. A., and K. R. Miller, eds. 1984. National Parks, Conservation, and Development. The Role of Protected Areas in Sustaining Society. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Miller, M. S., ed. 1993. State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger. Boston: Beacon Press. Nash, R. F. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ———. 1989. The Rights of Nature. A History of the Environmental Ethics. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Olson, S. 1989. “Extinction on Islands: Man as a Catastrophe.” In Conservation for the Twenty-first Century, eds. D. Western and M. Pearl, 50–53. New York: Oxford University Press. Rodes, B., and R. Odell, compilers. 1992. A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations. New York: Simon and Schuster. Runte, A. 1979. National Parks: The American Experience. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Shabecoff, P. 1993. A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement. New York: Hill and Wang. Southwick, C. H. 1976. Ecology and the Quality of Our Environment. Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt. Talbot, L. M. 1993. Principles for Living Resource Conservation: Preliminary Report on Consultations. Washington, D. C.: The Marine Mammal Commission. Thomas, K. 1983. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon.

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Tober, J. A. 1981. Who Owns the Wildlife? A Political Economy of Conservation in Nineteenth Century America. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Uphoff, N. 1985. “Fitting Projects to People.” In Putting People First, ed. Michael Cernea, 359–395. New York: Oxford University Press. Vedant, O. S. 1986. “Afforestation in India.” Ambio 15(4):254–255. Wells, M., and K. Brandon. 1992. People and Parks: Linking Protected Areas with Local Communities. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Western, D. 1984. “Conservation-based Rural Development.” In Sustaining Tomorrow: A Strategy for World Conservation and Development, eds. F. R. Thibodeau and H. H. Field, 94–110. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. ———. 1989. “Conservation Without Parks: Wildlife in the Rural Landscape.” In Conservation for the Twenty-first Century, eds. D. Western and M. Pearl, 158–165. New York: Oxford University Press. Wilkinson, C. F. 1992. Crossing the Next Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). 1987. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford University Press.

PA R T I

Case Studies

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+

Ecosystem Conservation and Rural Development: The Case of Amboseli David Western

The conservation efforts in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, described in this case study began as an exploratory project looking into new ways to secure a future for wildlife in Africa. In the course of time, those efforts broadened to involve many different people. They also became inextricably bound up with policy reform, legislation, and institution building. In the description that follows, I have tried to convey the flavor of the actors, ideas, and circumstances that influenced the direction of conservation programs in Amboseli and, eventually, a shift in national policy toward local participation.

Conservation Background The Amboseli area (see Map 2.1) has long been recognized for its abundant wildlife. Located in southern Maasailand on the northern slope of Mount Kilimanjaro, Amboseli lay on a slave and trading route connecting the coast with the Great Lakes of the interior. Amboseli’s large herds soon came to the notice of colonial administrators, and the area was incorporated into the Southern Reserve— what remained of Maasailand after expropriations for British settlers. The reserve, set up under the Special Districts Ordinance of 1902, was expanded in 1911 under a treaty between the colonial administration and Lenana, the Maasai’s spiritual leader. The treaty was intended to prohibit further annexation of Maasailand and leave the Maasai people free to develop along their own lines (Kantai 1971). In the process, the Amboseli ecosystem was protected inadvertently from hunting and settlement. The treaty, guaranteed “for as long as the Maasai shall exist as a race” (Kantai 1971), was soon challenged by the National Parks Ordinance of 1945. The ordinance signaled a shift in conservation policy from protection through hunting legislation to preservation through land protection (Simon 1962). The new position arose largely in response to burgeoning human and livestock numbers. Several areas including Nairobi, Tsavo East and West, Aberdares, and Mount Kenya were gazetted as national parks. Most of the parks lay within former Maasai territory. 15

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Amboseli and Mara were problematic, since they fell within the Southern Reserve covered by the Maasai Treaty. This did not stop the colonial government from trying to usurp Amboseli, but their efforts met stiff resistance. As a temporary solution, a 3,260-km2 area was established as the Amboseli National Reserve. Although the Maasai were not excluded, the reserve, administered by the Kenya National Parks (KNP) board, was viewed by the Maasai as an impending land grab. The Maasai’s continued resistance prevented the loss of Amboseli and Mara to the parks, even in the pre-Independence rush to set aside new land for wildlife conservation. Instead, game reserves were established under the administration of district, or “county,” councils. This alternative was partly the result of efforts by Lynn Temple-Boreham, then Narok District warden, who wanted to see the Maasai benefit from the area around the Mara (Talbot and Olindo 1990). Amboseli National Reserve became the Amboseli Game Reserve, administered by the Maasai Kajiado County Council under a similar arrangement. Despite Temple-Boreham’s motive, the traditional occupants were banned not just from Mara, but from virtually every other reserve, without compensation. The councils’ primary reason was to protect tourist revenues—the main source of income for many councils—from possible depletion due to encroachment by pastoralists. Consequently, local hostility toward the new county council reserves was at least as great as it had been toward the national reserves. Amboseli differed from Mara in that the Maasai were not prohibited from using the reserve, except for a 7,800-ha stock-free area at Ol Tukai. By 1967, county councils were well established as the form of district administration in Kenya. The weakness of this system soon became obvious. Where Kenya National Parks was concerned solely with conservation (and, toward that end, reinvested all its income in the parks), the councils used the reserves’ income to finance development in the more populous areas of their districts. Very little money was spent within the reserves. In 1969, for example, of earnings of some Ksh2 million (US$285,000), the Kajiado County Council spent less than Ksh50,000 (US$7,100) to run the reserve (Mitchell 1969). In short, the councils ignored the concerns of local people even more than Parks had, and they also did far less to protect wildlife. Amboseli came to national and international attention in the late 1960s because of four factors. First, Amboseli became a pivotal tourist destination in East Africa, rivaling the Serengeti and Ngorongoro in Tanzania. Amboseli owed its popularity to its remarkable diversity of wildlife; to long-horned rhinos Gertie and Gladys; and to Odinga, one of the biggest tuskers in Africa. Amboseli—with its superb setting of yellow-barked acacias (Acacia xanthophloea), marshes, and plains beneath the striking backdrop of Kilimanjaro—was the most widely advertised wildlife spectacle in East Africa. Tourism grew at 22 percent per year between 1965 and 1969 (Mitchell 1969) and contributed more than 70 percent of the Kajiado County Council’s income for the entire 20,000-km2 district (Western 1969b).

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Second, the growth in wildlife tourism, particularly in Amboseli, soon caught the interest of and raised concern within the Kenyan government. The government’s interest, as with the county council’s, lay in Amboseli’s income. The third factor, a strong conservation movement, was driven by international forces and an expatriate lobby within Kenya. The lobbyists insisted that the only assurance for wildlife’s future lay in parks, and they successfully played on the government’s interest in the fast-growing tourist economy. The threats to wildlife were rooted in the fourth factor, a 4 percent annual increase in the human population. This increase was beginning to lead to land shortages and strident demands for more land. Rural communities became openly hostile to wildlife and parks when their pleas went unheeded (Yeager and Miller 1986). Amboseli, the last renowned wildlife area in Kenya occupied by people, was the target of a well-publicized conservation campaign. Conservationists blamed livestock for turning the area into a dust bowl (Western 1969b) and Maasai herders for spearing dozens of rhinos, including Gertie. Numerous fingers pointed to the Kajiado County Council, which was accused of milking Amboseli and doing nothing to conserve it. The threats to Amboseli sparked my own interests. My perspective—to find a solution that would both satisfy the Maasai and preserve wildlife—was at variance with the strong protectionist ethos of the time. It needs some explanation, since it would have a major influence on the conservation approach adopted in Amboseli. I had grown up in Tanzania in the late 1940s and 1950s, when protectionist policies first were being implemented. My father, a part-time hunter, became an honorary warden in the Tanganyika Game Department and alternately protected wildlife from poachers and farmers from wildlife, with little sense of the inherent contradiction. He later lobbied for the creation of Mikumi National Park to protect the threatened herds from encroachment and poaching and to promote tourism. Two impressions of that period stand out. First, there was no such thing as wilderness in East Africa. Human activity was a natural and historical factor everywhere. Second, it was difficult to ignore local enmity toward colonial hunting laws and game reserves. Reserves were tellingly called shamba la bibi—literally, “the woman’s garden” in Swahili, referring to the British queen. The suffering of farmers and traditional hunters was acute. Wild animals regularly destroyed their crops and livestock. Many farmers lost their lives to wild animals each year. Most rural Africans expressed resentment over being denied the right to hunt or use traditional land within the protected areas. In short, protectionist policies seemed to be doing more harm than good. It was difficult not to develop a strong sympathy for the people most affected by these policies. My misgivings about the adequacy of parks were reinforced by my training in biology, a deep interest in ecosystems, and a survey of protected areas I made in 1967, prior to settling on Amboseli as a subject of study. No park covered an entire ecosystem, and most were far too small to survive in ecological isolation. More-

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over, the unnecessary hardship that wildlife caused people was virtually ignored in the postcolonial years (Yeager and Miller 1986). For the most part, after Independence, conservation remained the preserve of expatriates (mainly ex-colonial officers). Not surprisingly, then, the protectionagainst-people view of parks persisted. Researchers drawn to East Africa to look at pristine ecosystems (as they saw it) reinforced the view that parks were laboratories of nature. The largely mechanistic views of nature in vogue reinforced protectionist policies and hands-off management (Botkin 1990). The absence of human activity, itself an artifact of the establishment of parks, seldom was mentioned or considered. Amboseli Game Reserve was the logical place to investigate the conflicts between wildlife and people. I began work there in 1967, looking at the entire ecosystem and trying to resolve conflicts between Maasai and wildlife interests. The first phase of the study focused on the numbers and seasonal movements of wildlife and livestock, the ecology of the Maasai, and their attitudes toward wildlife. A description of Amboseli’s ecological, socioeconomic, and political background sets the stage for what followed.

Ecology The Amboseli ecosystem (see Map 2.1) is, for the most part, typical of the bushed grassland covering most of East Africa. Classified as Ecological Zone V (Pratt, Greenway, and Gwynne 1966), Amboseli sits on basement soils. Wildlife biomass and diversity is low and limited by seasonal water pans that dry soon after the rains. Local geological forces make this otherwise unremarkable ecosystem distinctive, productive, and diverse. Volcanic upheaval lifted the Kilimanjaro massif to nearly 6,000 m—4,800 m higher than the surrounding plain. Subsequent geological and climatic influences created an alkaline lake—the Amboseli Basin—at the northern slope of the mountain (Williams 1967). North of the basin, where the seasonal discharge backs up before entering the Kiboko-Sabaki River (Western 1975), the Ol Kajiado River forms a floodplain, favored by migratory ungulates. Kilimanjaro today creates opposing climatic and hydrological influences. Climatically, Amboseli is cradled in the rain shadow of the mountain. Rainfall (on average, 300 mm a year) comes in two seasons. The mountain discharges much of its forests’ 1,500-mm annual rainfall to the plains below through underground aquifers (Lahi 1967). Many springs fed by the aquifers dot the arid plains in a wide arc around the northern foot of the mountain (Map 2.1). The Amboseli basin has two main swamps, Longinye and Enkongo Narok, each used by migratory ungulates during the dry season. Kilimanjaro’s influence in Amboseli also extends to vegetation. The dry bushed grassland in the mountain’s northern rain shadow responds quickly to rain and attracts migrants from the Amboseli basin for as long as the rain pools last. The Am-

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boseli basin is quite different. Plant production—low over most of the northern basin, where the water table is deep—is dominated by a few grasses tolerant of alkaline conditions (Western and Sindiyo 1972). This otherwise simple habitat is complicated by the hydrologic influence of the mountain. The many swamps and shallow water table create a rich tapestry of habitats (Western 1973). The shifting swamps, fluctuating water table, and impact of elephants and Maasai on these habitats create continually changing relationships between them (Western and van Praet 1973). Amboseli’s diverse habitats support a richer variety of large mammals than the adjacent Tsavo East and West national parks, which are fifty times as large. All conservation efforts in Amboseli’s history, even the most current (KWS 1991), have focused on this high biodiversity. The Amboseli ecosystem is circumscribed by seasonal wildlife migrations (see Figure 2.1). Large aggregations of zebra, wildebeest, gazelle, and elephant migrate from the basin to the surrounding bush lands and Ol Kajiado River floodplain during the rains. The migrants spread erratically over an area of roughly 8,000 km2 (Figure 2.1), depending on rainfall patterns. The dry season forces migrants to concentrate close to permanent water in the basin (Western 1975) and limits the size of populations. All ungulates show some degree of habitat selectivity in the basin (Western 1973), and they move along a gradient of increasing abundance and declining quality of forage as the season progresses (Western and Lindsay 1984). Maasai livestock—cattle, sheep, and goats—traditionally follow a similar migratory pattern (Western and Dunne 1979). The plans to resolve the conflict in Amboseli drew heavily from this research, highlighting the importance of the area’s high ecological diversity, the annual migrations, and the interactions of the Maasai and wildlife.

Maasai Life-style and Politics Pastoralism has been a factor in the East African savannas for three thousand years, and probably longer (Marshall 1989), although the Maasai themselves only moved down from the north as little as five hundred years ago (Kituyi 1990). Traditional Maasai pastoralists depended on cattle for milk and on cattle, sheep, and goats for meat. They bartered for agricultural products from neighboring tribes when milk supplies dried up (Galaty 1982). Large herds, mobility, and sophisticated herding practices helped the Maasai survive drought (Western and Finch 1986). Human herders shadowed the wildlife migrants through the seasons but made greater use of the forest-edge pastures on Kilimanjaro. The area used and defended most vigorously was Amboseli, the Maasai name for the basin. Maasai attitudes toward wildlife since colonial times have ranged from indifference to antagonism. Many Maasai elders claim that wildlife traditionally was used as “second cattle” to see them through droughts when their own herds were

Figure 2.1 Wildlife Biomass for Dry Counts (excluding elephants)

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depleted (Western 1982a). Reliance on second cattle helps to explain the traditional Maasai tolerance toward wildlife. This relationship was to become the basis of the Development Plans for Amboseli formulated in the mid-1970s. Maasai land and resource ownership was typical of East Africa’s pastoral societies until two decades ago (Galaty 1982). Land was communally owned, and forage was freely available to all members of a section. Each section was politically autonomous and made up of a number of clans (Sankan 1971). Battles within Maasailand usually were over sectional access to forage during drought. One section, the Ilkisongo, covers the whole basin and most of the ecosystem. Two adjacent sections, the Matapatu to the west and the Kaputei to the north, border the ecosystem. Grazing disputes between the Ilkisongo and Kaputei sections in the last few decades have arisen over sectional boundaries, often during drought. By contrast, the Ilkisongo section associated with the Amboseli area did not deny grazing to any of the clans within the ecosystem. Water, often contested within other pastoral societies (Galaty 1982), is not disputed, since the main sources are large, open bodies. The Maasai had no centralized government because they were mobile and had low population densities. Individual families owned their own herds and made their own foraging decisions (Kituyi 1990). Consequently, they had little need to reach communal decisions, except when it came to ceremonies, raids, defense, and, sometimes, access to pasture and water. Political authority in the age-graded Maasai society was vested in the ruling elders (Jacobs 1975), whose gatherings were egalitarian. The elders’ decisions grew out of consensus. A spokesman (the Olaigwenani) was selected for each age group by the “fire-stick elders,” or patrons, of the age group (Kituyi 1990). In the Amboseli region, traditional political institutions, including those for resolving grazing disputes, weakened in the face of official governmental structures but were not entirely undermined (Spencer 1988). Maasai life-style and politics are directly relevant to conservation and development programs that rely on community participation. Neither the Maasai traditional social structure nor the mobile life-style readily lends itself to communitybased programs. Although the Maasai are egalitarian to an unusual degree, authority nevertheless rests with the ruling elders. Women traditionally had no formal role in decision making and even today have little say. Government chiefs and elected members of Parliament (MPs) complicate the picture further. In many cases, chiefs are traditional leaders. But over the last few decades, chiefs and MPs have consolidated their power in parallel with the centralization of power by government (Kituyi 1990). One important consequence has been the weakening of the district councils’ authority, including that of the Kajiado County Council (KCC), which administered the Amboseli Game Reserve. The council was, until the mid-1970s, a powerful political and development force within the area. All the communal lands—effectively the entire district—were vested in the council. That influence declined sharply when the communal lands

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23

were subdivided into group and individual lands in the 1970s, and diminished further with the centralization of political power in Kenya throughout the 1980s. History also has played an important role in the Maasai psyche. Smallpox, drought, and rinderpest had a crippling effect on their society and economy in the early colonial period. Thus the colonial perception was that Maasailand was underutilized, resulting in a series of land grabs for white settlement (Kituyi 1990). The Maasai subsequently withdrew to the Southern Reserve and into themselves. Independence found them ill prepared for the rapid modernization and free-market economy ushered in by the government of Jomo Kenyatta. The Maasai had one of the lowest literacy levels in Kenya at that time, with less than 10 percent of their children entering primary school in the 1960s (Ochilo 1991). Another factor in the political and economic marginalization of the Maasai after Independence was the antipathy the central government showed toward pastoralists in general (Galaty and Salzman 1980). The Maasai’s seeming reticence in the face of modernization was viewed as fierce traditionalism at best and plain backwardness at worst. The traditionalism reflected the Maasai’s strong cultural values. But until the 1970s, circumstance played as much a part as attitude. The Maasai had become wealthier without changing their traditional system, as stock recovered from the disasters of the late 1800s and then increased sharply with veterinary services and water development in the 1940s and 1950s (see Figure 2.2). Per capita stock holdings rose, and market incentives to sell—when markets were accessible—remained weak (Kituyi 1990). The Maasai’s revitalized subsistence economy remained robust until human population increase and drought whittled down family holdings in the mid-1970s (Figure 2.2). In addition, around Independence, Kikuyu and Kamba people started settling Kilimanjaro and some of the swamps east of Amboseli. This added to the land shortage and pressure on Amboseli. By the late 1960s, pressure increased for legal land ownership, and Maasai tolerance of wildlife quickly evaporated. The Maasai’s antagonism toward any takeover of Amboseli or concession to wildlife must be seen in this historical context.

Working Toward a Locally Based Conservation Plan I began work in Amboseli shortly after Daniel Sindiyo’s appointment as warden. Sindiyo’s background and influence did much to foster the locally based conservation plan. As a Maasai brought up in Narok District, he was keenly aware of the coexistence of wildlife and pastoralists. He had a strong interest in conservation and, as a young indigenous Kenyan, an equally strong commitment to development. Sindiyo received a diploma in wildlife management from Colorado State University. Afterward, he spent three years as an education officer in the Kenyan

Figure 2.2

120

100

80

600

60

P E O P L E (1,000)

C A T T L E (1,000 head)

800

400 40

200 1948

1952

1956

1960

1964

1968

1972

1976

1980

20 1984

YEARS

Livestock and human population trends in Kajiado District. The per capita stock holdings show the progressive decline in Maasai livestock subsistence. The strong downturns are associated with drought. Data from Grandon 1991.

24

KEY Per Capita Livestock (= People/10) Number of Cattle Number of People

AMBOSELI

25

Game Department. There he used money from the sale of wildlife trophies to build dams and health clinics for Samburu herders (Sindiyo 1968). Sindiyo’s background and education distinguished him from other wardens of the time, and our views on Amboseli were similar from the outset. The first phase of my research helped to provide ecological data upon which subsequent conservation plans were based. The finding of most immediate significance was that the game reserve, which was being promoted as a national park within government and conservation circles, held little of the wet-season migrations. Furthermore, Maasai and wildlife migrations were more or less identical. The combination meant that wildlife migrants would not be fully protected, even if the Maasai were totally excluded from the reserve. The total exclusion of the Maasai was in itself an obstacle, given their political antagonism. Both the ecological and socioeconomic realities began to suggest a radically different conservation alternative to segregating the Maasai and wildlife. Sindiyo and I both began working with the local community in different ways. Sindiyo, as warden, set up a wildlife committee of influential elders to resolve conflicts within the game reserve. I befriended a number of elders and warriors to learn more about their life-style, ecology, and attitudes toward wildlife. Many of the insights on which subsequent plans were based were a direct result of these close associations. Some of my friendships with Maasai elders and warriors, among them Parashino Ole Purdul and Kerenkol Ole Musa, were formalized through an exchange of livestock. As stock associates (Jacobs 1975), we openly discussed the future of the Maasai, wildlife, and Amboseli. The Maasai were fully aware of my commitment to conservation; they made their own priorities and welfare equally clear. Our exchange of ideas was easier because I was a student of wildlife and not a wildlife officer. I was seen as someone willing to listen and talk openly on a topic about which they felt strongly. Ole Purdul’s ideas and insights helped clarify options and shape plans in the years 1968 to 1974. Even by Maasai standards, Ole Purdul had a deep understanding of wildlife ecology and livestock husbandry. He contributed much to the 1973 Development Plans for Amboseli. Kerenkol Ole Musa, the Olaigwenani spokesman of the warrior age group, was another important influence during this early stage. The pace of Sindiyo’s and my own efforts was forced into high gear by a plan under discussion at the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife (MTW). The plan, which originated with a wealthy industrialist, Royal Little, proposed setting aside a 500-km2 national park in exchange for providing the Maasai with alternative sources of water. The plan, backed by the New York Zoological Society (NYZS), won ministry approval and was put to the Kajiado County Council. The council tentatively agreed but quickly backed away after the plan was rejected at an elders’ meeting in 1968. Both Sindiyo and the area MP, Stanley Oloitiptip, were present. Oloitiptip, then assistant minister of health, insisted on a local solution

26

CHAPTER 2

rather than one imposed from outside. Although he was caught between government and local interests, Oloitiptip sided squarely with the Maasai. The elders deeply resented the proposal and wrote a strong letter articulating their views (Lwezaula 1970). Much as they favored positive returns from Amboseli, they had received no remuneration, despite their accommodation of wildlife. The elders’ rejection of the plan led to renewed pressure on the government to take over Amboseli. Conservationists argued forcefully for decisive action to avoid the destruction of Amboseli through overgrazing. The result was a race between the government’s little-disguised takeover efforts and Oloitiptip’s search for a local solution. Oloitiptip was unrealistic in thinking that the Maasai would come up with their own conservation plan, given their deep antipathy to wildlife at that time. The alternatives were either to let the Maasai’s decision stand and risk losing Amboseli to the government, or to press for action in the Maasai’s long-term interests. Sindiyo believed it was necessary to pursue the latter course. I had my own reasons for following a similar course. First, the livestock and human population trends showed an impending collapse of the Maasai’s traditional cattle economy (see Figure 2.2). There seemed to be no alternative to eventual diversification. The Maasai had, in fact, already voluntarily entered the market economy. Despite a centralized government marketing system that discouraged Maasai sales, herders regularly sold livestock to make cash purchases of blankets, tea, sugar, flashlights, livestock drugs, and other consumer items (Western 1973). Younger warriors found the task of building up their herds increasingly difficult and were entering the wage economy in increasing numbers. Few Maasai elders, however, were willing to admit the inevitability of change, although they were aware of their faltering economy. Only elders such as Simon Salash, who had some education and experience outside Maasailand, saw hard times ahead for their people. In contrast to the traditional elders, these men felt that, in competition with more educated and politically savvy Kenyans, the Maasai would be consigned to second-class status. My second reason was that wildlife offered the only economic alternative to stock keeping in the arid Amboseli area. This was no longer a vague prospect, given the demonstrable growth of tourist income within the reserve (see Figure 2.3). Tentative steps toward the first locally based conservation plan for Amboseli came out of discussions with Maasai elders and my own observations. The main elements that I felt would balance Maasai and wildlife interests and conserve the ecosystem as a whole were • A nominal area (about 6 percent of the ecosystem) should be set aside to secure viewing facilities and protect the abundance and diversity of the large-mammal community from future land annexation and development. The area, defined by ecological surveys, would be set aside as a “Maasai park.” The move would

300

30

250

25

200

20

Visitors

150

100

15

10

Income

50

NATIONAL PARK INCOME (KSHS. Millions)

VISITOR NUMBERS (Thousands)

Figure 2.3

5

Vehicles

0

0 1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

YEAR

Annual gate earnings and visitor statistics for Amboseli National Park.

27

28

CHAPTER 2

safeguard the area against government annexation, channel tourist benefits to the Maasai as the elders requested (Lwezaula 1970), and assuage the government and conservationists in the process. • Some 94 percent of the ecosystem, including some of the dry-season and all of the wet-season grazing area, would be secured for the Maasai. This proposal rested on the premise that the ecologies of the Maasai and wildlife were intertwined and historically compatible. The proposal would, in other words, degazette all but some 10 percent of the Amboseli Game Reserve and hand it over to the local Maasai for livestock use. • Wildlife from the park would have free access to these Maasai livestock lands. In exchange, the Maasai would receive specified benefits from the park and the right to utilize wildlife over the rest of the ecosystem. I continued my own investigations and discussions with Maasai associates through early 1969, although my role was informal. Sindiyo, meanwhile, discussed the options more formally with the wildlife committee.

Reactions and Response I put a preliminary proposal to the East Africa Natural History Society in Nairobi in 1969, with the intention of sparking wider discussion and greater appreciation of problems and options within the conservation community. The presentation was couched in terms of optimal land use, but from a local and national rather than a conservation perspective. The controversial elements in the proposal included making Amboseli into a Maasai park, giving benefits to the local residents, and degazetting most of the reserve for livestock use. The premise was that wildlife would have to pay its way. The plan was not well received by conservationists, nor by the Maasai elders at first. The only positive backing came from the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Nairobi. IDS support contributed a strong multidisciplinary component to the plan. In collaboration with IDS, I expanded my study to include a number of economic analyses of wildlife tourism and livestock development as well as anthropological, political, and administrative issues. Our interdisciplinary effort looked at conservation options within the framework of both the potential national and local benefits accruing from the ecosystem (Western 1969a; Mitchell 1969). The studies involved dialogue between IDS members and Maasai in Amboseli, but the pastoralists continued to distrust any wildlife plan. Suspicions were eased only by talk of tourist income, livestock development, and health facilities for the Maasai. The expanded planning phase, like the preliminary round, drew from local discussions and looked explicitly at locally based solutions. While the initiative did not come from the community as Oloitiptip had hoped, it was nonetheless rooted in long-term local interests. There were protracted on-the-ground discussions with the Maasai, as well as with their wildlife committee.

AMBOSELI

29

One immediate and portentous outcome of the land-use study was an economic analysis that revealed enormous economic returns, both actual and potential, from wildlife tourism (Mitchell 1969). These large wildlife revenues drew considerable press interest, resulting in a double-page spread in the Kenyan daily Standard. This article featured in all later discussions, locally and nationally. Frank Mitchell, the social economist behind the analysis, would become an influential figure in promoting local involvement of the Maasai within government circles and at the World Bank. Sindiyo, after further local discussions, put the plan before the Kajiado County Council and the Amboseli elders in August 1969. The plan was purposefully simple and rudimentary (Western 1969a, 1970), leaving detailed discussion to the Maasai. It was debated over a two-day period by the elders, Oloitiptip, the Kajiado County Council, and Sindiyo. The reception was mixed. The elders remained distrustful and dubious. Their attitude was, “If the government hasn’t given us anything in the past, why should it now?” They had the same feelings about the Kajiado County Council. Oloitiptip, together with the other educated Maasai (including councilors and Sindiyo), finally persuaded the elders to adopt the essence of the plan and continue to work out the details. Oloitiptip stressed the potential benefits of a Maasai park as outlined in the Standard article, the inevitability of change, the need for a long-term view, and the threat of a government takeover. Those at the meeting finally agreed and opted to accept the NYZS’s monetary offer. The significance of this meeting should not be overlooked: The plan was commissioned and adopted locally within a traditional framework and prevailing political and administrative structures. Six weeks later, however, the plan foundered, and opposition candidates in the impending parliamentary elections played on Maasai fears of land annexation. The answer, as far as the Maasai were concerned, lay in private and group ownership of land. The government saw “group ranches” as a way to improve livestock control and development by partitioning communal lands into smaller holdings based on traditional seasonal movements. The Maasai saw the issue differently: By effectively privatizing the communal lands under joint title, the group ranches legitimized their claim to all Maasailand, making wildlife concessions unnecessary. Oloitiptip read the political mood and began to oppose the Amboseli plan on the basis of losing “not one more inch” of Maasailand. Amboseli’s wildlife undoubtedly would have dwindled within a decade had Amboseli been incorporated as a group ranch. Namelok Swamp, adjacent to Amboseli, illustrates the trend: Once Namelok was adjudicated and title granted to group ranches, the swamps were drained for farming and wildlife was driven out. By 1980, the herds had all but disappeared from Namelok. The die was cast for government intervention. Sindiyo resigned shortly afterward, when the Kajiado County Council’s financial support for the reserve waned. The council, in a move that can only be described as suicidal, cut back expendi-

30

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tures further, installed a corrupt and inept warden, and effectively abandoned the reserve. Failure of the local plans and the council’s pullout fed directly into the hands of the conservationists who wanted a national park. The Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife appealed to President Kenyatta to act on Amboseli in the “national interest.”

Cycles of Planning and Lobbying: Opening the Dialogue The threat of government takeover was realized in 1971. President Kenyatta decreed that an unspecified 200 mi.2 of Amboseli would be set aside as government land and the Maasai compensated with alternative water sources. The Maasai were irate. Large numbers of lions, leopard cubs, hyenas, rhinos, and elephants were killed in the next few weeks. The point could not have been made more clearly: The government could annex Amboseli, but its fate lay squarely with the Maasai. Oloitiptip promptly led a Maasai delegation to see the President and won back 50 mi.2. At this stage, I became an unofficial arbitrator between the Maasai and the government. My immediate aim was to salvage as much of the locally based plan as I could within the constraints imposed by the presidential decree. In Amboseli I met regularly with an informal network of Maasai, including Ole Purdul and Ole Musa, in an attempt to defuse the crisis and promote local involvement. Both men had begun to appreciate the opportunities that the Amboseli plan held for the Maasai, but they had little hope of securing them. In Nairobi, I articulated the need for local involvement and the danger of ignoring the Maasai by citing the protest spearings. Both Daniel Sindiyo and Frank Mitchell played important advocacy roles. Sindiyo, who had risen to the position of deputy chief game warden, urged the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife to consider local benefits. Mitchell, recently appointed an advisor to the Ministry of Finance and Planning, cogently articulated the economic case for integrating wildlife and livestock development in the Amboseli ecosystem. This ministry would have an influential voice. One outcome of this joint effort to salvage something of the original plan was the reallocation to the Kajiado County Council of a 156-ha land parcel around the two existing lodges. The Ol Tukai parcel was explicitly handed back to the Maasai to give them an economic stake in Amboseli and to calm the fears of other district councils vis-à-vis the future of the game reserves. Getting the ministry to accept the wisdom of truly local benefits proved more difficult. But there was an even greater obstacle: Now that Amboseli was national land, no local involvement was possible until government policy and legislation was changed. Since the ministry remained implacably opposed to revising its protectionist policies, change had to come through the backdoor. The opportunity arose in 1971 during negotiations between the Ministry of Livestock Development and the World Bank on a US$40 million extension to a live-

AMBOSELI

31

stock development program for the Kenyan rangelands. Working with the World Bank appraisal mission for the Livestock 2 program, Mitchell and I alerted its team to the enormous potential wildlife held for landowners. These potential benefits— and the tourist industry—were threatened by plans to develop the rangeland areas for livestock production without regard to alternative economic options. Interestingly, the link between conservation and landowner income, which had eluded the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, was immediately obvious to livestock planners. The Ministry of Agriculture and the World Bank agreed to fund water projects around Amboseli, Kitengela, and Mara if the Maasai received benefits from wildlife. They also agreed to finance a Kenya Rangeland Ecological Monitoring Unit to monitor ecological changes on the rangelands. The Ministry of Lands also was pressured into accepting a single large group ranch around Amboseli rather than a series of smaller holdings. The basic premise was that the revenue distribution from Amboseli to the surrounding landowners, as called for under the Livestock 2 loan agreement, would be greatly simplified by a single holding. Data on Maasai migratory patterns, derived from the ecological monitoring programs, were also instrumental, since they stressed the need for Maasai herding flexibility in this drought-prone area. The resulting 120,000-ha Ololorashi Ogulului Group Ranch ultimately would greatly simplify revenuesharing programs established by Amboseli National Park in 1977 and 1991. The Livestock 2 proposal and the terms relating to Amboseli (the only program ultimately implemented) led to an overall review of national wildlife policy. The terms relating to Amboseli would not have been adopted without the backing of the New York Zoological Society. NYZS backing (and funding) gave the World Bank the assurance it needed that this new and untested conservation approach had the support of at least one influential conservation body. NYZS also recognized the centrality but official weakness of my own position and later insisted on funding me in an oversight capacity as a precondition of the grant to the ministry. The involvement of the NYZS and the formal backing it gave the project would prove crucial to subsequent planning, monitoring, and institution building. The Amboseli plan opened up a second and more important opportunity. Mitchell convinced the World Bank of the need for a scaled-up economic package for parks and reserves based on the principle of landowner participation. The loan package of approximately US$40 million drew the ministry directly into the planning process and face to face with the need for policy reform. Mitchell and I were asked to prepare an Amboseli plan as a working model, spelling out the principles, details, and financial implications. The plan was intended to provide the economic justification and overall rationale for a scaled-up national tourism and wildlife project involving training, institution building, planning, enforcement, and wildlife utilization. Mitchell soon moved from the Kenyan Ministry of Finance and Planning to the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. Economist Philip Thresher of the Kenya Wildlife Management Project took over the task of helping to prepare what

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CHAPTER 2

was called the Development Plans for Amboseli (Western and Thresher 1973). In this instance, the Amboseli plans helped legitimize the national program and not the reverse, although implementation of the Amboseli plan itself depended on national policy reforms. These would not have been necessary had Amboseli become a Maasai park rather than a national preserve. The Development Plans for Amboseli, which rationalized the integration of livestock and wildlife economies (see Table 2.1), included utilization schemes on the group ranches, payment of the opportunity costs incurred by the ranches in accommodating Amboseli’s migratory herds, Maasai involvement in the tourist industry, and various other benefits including a community center on the park periphery. Although focused primarily on tourism, the plan was explicitly an ecosystem conservation plan and stressed the need for wildlife utilization on Maasai group ranches outside the protected area. This integration required an amalgamation of the traditionally divided roles of the Game Department and the national parks. The broad support for the new policies proved decisive. At a meeting on June 26, 1974, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife reluctantly adopted the position that wildlife must pay its way on private and communal lands, in reference to Amboseli, and tacitly accepted the need for a national overhaul of wildlife policy. The protracted maneuvers over policy did not involve the Maasai, much as they rested on principles they had voiced (Lwezaula 1970). But the terms of the NYZS/World Bank water project changed that situation, since it required an agreement, at least in principle, between the Maasai and the ministry. An increasing number of government and World Bank visits to Amboseli had talking with the Maasai as their focus. Although at first this involved government experts handing ideas to the Maasai—usually through Oloitiptip—rather than discussing them, at least an exchange was under way. The dialogue improved quickly in 1973 and 1974, especially when the Kenya Wildlife Management Project (KWMP) became formally involved. The Food and Agriculture Organization funded the Kenya Wildlife Management Project, set up in 1971 to develop wildlife utilization plans in Kajiado District. Initially, the expatriate advisers were interested only in hunting-management programs, not in tourism or local benefits. But the ailing KWMP hunting program was redirected toward wildlife tourism and utilization projects and landowner benefits after Thresher helped to prepare the Development Plans for Amboseli. Sindiyo again was a strong catalyst. Several events led to more open dialogue on development plans for the ecosystem. First, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife announced in 1974 that Amboseli would be taken over as a national park. The move did not come as a complete surprise. Kenya National Parks recently had posted a warden, Joe Kioko, to Amboseli to avert the crisis created by Kajiado County Council’s abandonment of the reserve after the presidential decree. The takeover nevertheless outraged the Maasai, who saw Parks as their implacable enemy. The Maasai had good reason

Table 2.1

Gross revenues from existing and potential uses of Amboseli as calculated in 1973

Park Total wildlife 1972

US$1,200,000.

Total livestock 1972 (cash returns only) Subsistence value livestock 1972 Wildlife potential (no livestock) Commercial livestock potential (no wildlife) Combined wildlife and commercial livestock potential

Ecosystem +

US$1,202,710.

3,000.

4,200.

199,188.

597,562.

6,560,000.

8,030,000.+

69,300.

445,930.

6,560,000.

8,285,580.

33

34

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to believe they would once again be evicted from a park without receiving any benefit. Kioko, encouraged by Parks Director Perez Olindo to engage in constructive dialogue as Sindiyo had done, averted the crisis. Kioko acted in the spirit of principles yet to be legislated rather than that of existing Parks policy. He reconvened the Maasai’s wildlife committee, calling on representatives of the four group ranches that had been identified as encompassing the wildlife dispersal area for Amboseli. The group ranches eventually would change Maasai attitudes toward property rights and wildlife. But at the time, given the prevailing Maasai conservatism and government paternalism, common ground was hard to find and mutual agreement difficult to come by. Ironically, the 1973–1977 drought, which took a heavy toll on Maasai livestock, helped change attitudes. Per capita stock holdings plunged by half (see Figure 2.2), stock prices fell, and grain prices rose (Kituyi 1990). The poorer Maasai survived largely on famine relief. The more progressive, like Ole Purdul and Ole Musa, began to diversify economically through livestock sales, small-scale farming, and wage employment. Their interest in wildlife benefits also grew. Ole Purdul, in the course of our many discussions on the subject, again pointed out that the Maasai had traditionally hunted wildlife during droughts and regarded them as second cattle—a relationship that had been destroyed by the colonial government. Monetary and other benefits from wildlife, in other words, could be seen as a Maasai tradition in modern guise. Ole Purdul’s revelations helped garner support for Maasai participation among agencies in Nairobi. With Ole Musa, he campaigned assiduously and effectively among the Amboseli Maasai. From my own continuing ecological studies and discussions with Ole Purdul, Ole Musa, and other influential elders, I was convinced that the Maasai could not survive the drought without swamp grazing, all of which lay within the designated park boundaries. The elders suggested two access points. I put the proposed changes to the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife and pushed for discussions. As a result, the ministry met with the Maasai for the first time on January 24, 1974. The Maasai were represented by more than one hundred elders, warriors, and leaders and the ministry by the permanent secretary and other officials. Subsequently, the park boundaries were surveyed and redrawn. More important, the meeting broke the ice between the two parties. The wildlife utilization fee, new water points, and the prospect of income from lodges on the group ranches were debated. The parties reached an agreement, at least in principle, at this meeting. In the final analysis, the local public participation that the January meeting initiated would prove its most enduring impact. Other public meetings followed, including the establishment of a Maasai hunting association. The association, engineered by the Kenya Wildlife Management Project and put to the Maasai by Oloitiptip at Sindiyo’s urging, was launched at a large public baraza held in Kimana on March 19, 1975. Under this plan, the Maasai group ranches leased out hunting concessions as envisaged in

AMBOSELI

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the Development Plans for Amboseli. These concessions, involving a great deal of local participation, brought in more than Ksh1.9 million (US$271,000) for southern Kajiado group ranches between 1975 and 1977. Poaching levels dropped sharply. Direct dialogue had become common practice by the time the new wildlife policy (Sessional Paper No. 2) was introduced in 1975 and the Wildlife Act was passed in 1977. The policies, based on the principle of wildlife paying its way outside parks, called for direct negotiations on the future of wildlife in dispersal areas between the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife and landowners. The Wildlife Act also called for the creation of an implementing agency, the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WCMD), to put the new policies into effect. The agency would prove disastrous not just for Amboseli, but for the locally based approach and Kenya’s wildlife generally. The first mistake lay in making the institution a government department within the ministry rather than a parastatal organization similar to the former Kenya National Parks; the second lay in appointing as director the former head of the game department, a man heavily implicated in poaching rackets. By 1976, top-down policy decisions made in Nairobi rapidly gave way to onthe-ground planning through the wildlife committees and public barazas. Issues were debated and resolved through the newly constituted group ranch committees. The most important were discussed at widely attended annual general meetings. The Kenya Wildlife Management Project held two successful workshops on the locally based approach, one for government agencies (PBFL 1977a) and another for the Maasai, specifically addressing people’s participation in conservation (PBFL 1977b). This is not to say that dialogue was fully communal; but inasmuch as the elders and group ranch committees were the traditional and legal authorities, local participation had become the means of pursuing implementation of the Development Plans for Amboseli. But with the new policies passed, alternative water sources in place, and the US$37.5 million tourism and wildlife loan agreed, the project was ready for implementation. Nearly US$6 million was earmarked for Amboseli. The exclusion of the Maasai from the park was delayed for a year because of the drought. Another public baraza brought the Maasai and the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife together to agree on the final terms of Maasai relinquishment. The Maasai extracted their own preconditions, including the Kajiado County Council’s retention of the 156-ha Ol Tukai inholding, an annual grazing fee to cover the opportunity cost of the Amboseli migrants’ use of the adjacent Maasai ranches, the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department’s assumption of responsibility for the four southern boreholes, and a new swamp for Maasai livestock outside the park that would be fed by Enkongo Narok spring. WCMD also was to pay the Kajiado County Council a further Ksh460,000 (US$65,000) for the right to manage the council’s land at Ol Tukai. The ministry did not, however, extract management rights from the council, despite regular pay-

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ments. That failure would prove troublesome in future years, when the council, as anticipated, tried to overdevelop Ol Tukai. The agreement was reached at a public baraza in accordance with Maasai wishes. The elders eschewed any written agreement, given their past experience of failed contracts. They insisted that a public baraza, in the time-honored way, was open to all and based on consensus. This too would prove a costly mistake. The government abrogated every term of the agreement within four years, creating a legacy of distrust that the successor to WCMD, the Kenya Wildlife Service, inherited more than ten years later. At the baraza, the first wildlife payments—Ksh1.9 million (US$271,000) from the hunting concessions—were given out to the members of the group ranches in the Amboseli region. As the first affirmation of the new policies, this did much to convince the Maasai to vacate the park. The elders at the baraza responded to what they hailed as a new era of cooperation and mutual benefit by saying, “Wildlife have become our second cattle once more. We will be able to milk them when our own cows run dry in droughts. The national park has gained two thousand extra pairs of eyes to help watch out for poachers.”

Implementation and Outcomes The implementation of the Development Plans for Amboseli and subsequent events occurred in three phases: the formal project phase, the period when the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department collapsed, and the period following establishment of the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Phase 1, 1977–1981: Implementation of the Plan The period from 1977 to 1981 saw most of the Development Plans for Amboseli under way. During this phase, the park viewing tracks were completed, the headquarters and Maasai community center were built, and a detailed management plan was drawn up by the newly instituted Wildlife Planning Unit (WPU) of WCMD. Improved roads and heightened visitor management contributed to a drop in off-road driving, from around 150,000 km per year to less than 25,000 km. Most programs involving the Maasai and the larger ecosystem also were implemented. The wildlife utilization fee was paid twice yearly during the dry seasons, with allocations based on the opportunity costs to the four group ranches within the dispersal area: Ogulului, Kimana, Mbirikani, and Selengei. The ranches earned additional revenues from quarries that provided road ballast and from firewood collection. WCMD and the lodges hired many local Maasai. Revenues from wildlife now exceeded costs and began to contribute to the Maasai’s development needs. The Maasai wildlife committee, representing the four group ranches, met

AMBOSELI

37

monthly with the Amboseli warden and functioned fairly well. The group ranch committees received grazing compensation directly and decided how it should be spent. My inputs declined sharply and became largely advisory in nature. The institutions created to implement the plan appeared to work, at least initially. Ogulului built a primary school at Maarba with the wildlife utilization fee. Oloitiptip opened the school, the first in the area. At a large public rally, he pointed out that wildlife should now be seen as Maasai cattle and stressed that wildlife income had made Ogulului the wealthiest group ranch in Maasailand. Several other barazas reinforced the link between wildlife and development. Spearing and poaching became rare. Rhino and elephant populations began to recover (Western 1982a). Overall, wildlife biomass in the ecosystem rose quickly after the drought and in the absence of poaching (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5). Total biomass— most particularly that of zebra and wildebeest—eventually would far exceed predrought levels in the park (Figure 2.4). The wildlife committee regularly informed the warden of legal infractions and helped track down the few Maasai who speared animals. A final indicator of success was the impact the Amboseli approach had on national policy in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, including Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Zambia. Amboseli, as originally intended, became a test case for an integrated approach to wildlife conservation and development. Ironically, the Amboseli plan began to falter after 1981, just as it began to be widely touted as a model for local participation. The reason, as will become evident further on, lay with government. There were also some notable failures in the implementation of the Amboseli plan. One was the government’s decision to ban hunting. The decision was taken during the tourism and wildlife loan negotiations. The ban was an assurance to the World Bank that Kenya intended to clean up poaching, in which the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department was heavily implicated. However, the ban reduced the potential wildlife income in nontourist areas, where hunting was regarded as a complementary land-use activity. Another failure was the community center designed for the Maasai. This would remain little used until the late 1980s, due to poor siting and low demand from the Maasai. The elders also rejected a public campsite on their land (a project I had promoted assiduously since 1972), despite the revenues it would bring. The elders saw the move for a campsite as a trick to secure more ground for the park. Later, when suspicions began to subside, the elders bolstered their position by insisting that the loss of Acacia tortilis trees associated with the campsite would deprive their goats of nutritious seeds needed as food. Finally, the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department did not maintain the water pipeline satisfactorily or take over the southern boreholes as promised. Low government allocations to the department at this stage reflected

Figure 2.4 4,500

Park W I L D L I F E B I O M A S S ( k g p e r k m 2)

4,000 3,500 3,000

2,500 2,000 1,500

Ecosystem

1,000 500 0 1980

1975

1985

1990

YEAR

Yearly averaged biomass of wildlife in the Amboseli ecosystem and national park. The drop in the 1970s coincides with drought. Increase in the park is to levels higher than before the drought.

Figure 2.5 1,000 NUMBER OF ELEPHANTS

Ecosystem 800

600

400

200 Park 0 1972

1974

1976

1978

1980

1982

1984

1986

1988

1990

YEAR

Number of elephants in the Amboseli ecosystem and national park. The trend in the early 1970s shows a rapid loss in numbers consistent with trends throughout East Africa. The initial increase in the park was due to immigration from the ecosystem. The increase in total population after 1977 runs against the continuing collapse of elephant populations elsewhere, a measure of the protection given by the Maasai around Amboseli.

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public antipathy to wildlife and a flagging tourist market (see Figure 2.3), precipitated by the 1970s oil crises. An additional contributing factor was the high turnover of senior ministry officials. Officers not present at the 1977 baraza refused to acknowledge the verbal contract. Consequently, the link between wildlife and human welfare, which had taken so long to establish in Amboseli, evaporated. At the conclusion of the implementation phase, the Amboseli Plan was a considerable success, if measured by the original goals: to create new ways to resolve the human and wildlife conflicts in the ecosystem, to keep the ecosystem intact, and to improve the prospects for wildlife and the Maasai alike. The project also established formal dialogue between WCMD and the Maasai group ranches through the wildlife committee. Still largely lacking was community willingness to take the initiative in diversifying wildlife income, as in the case of the campsite. This in part reflected the developing political oligarchy in Kenya, with Oloitiptip becoming powerful after helping Vice President Daniel T. arap Moi to succeed Kenyatta. Oloitiptip became the mouthpiece for the Maasai in all matters, not only wildlife, thus short-circuiting community involvement. But the lack of initiative also stemmed from Maasai conservatism and an individualism that precluded community action. The Maasai, however, were in the process of rapid transition from subsistence pastoralism to a mixed economy that included small-scale farming, wage employment (reflected in the emigration of young men), and—with the emergence of a liberal livestock market and rapidly rising beef prices—commercial ranching. These trends, and the rise of a young, educated cadre of Maasai with a more worldly view, sowed the seeds of change that would alter Maasai aspirations and attitudes in the 1980s (Kituyi 1990). Economic and social changes soon would become the dominant forces shaping local initiatives.

Phase 2, 1982–1987: Alternatives to the Plan The early successes of the Development Plans for Amboseli quickly faded after 1981. Heavy equipment and vehicles lay derelict, roads deteriorated, enforcement activity declined, and visitor management was suspended. The ecosystem plans also faltered. The annual wildlife utilization fee stopped, the water pipeline broke down for lack of funds, livestock moved back into the park, the wildlife committee rarely met, and the relationship between the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department and the Maasai became distinctly antagonistic. Spearing increased, and the wildlife committee did little to help apprehend the culprits. Rhino numbers began dwindling again. Lindsay (1987) suggests, based on this period, that the Amboseli plan was a failure. His conclusion that the reasons were lack of local participation and lack of Maasai interest in economic benefits is, however, erroneous. The Maasai themselves called for an economic stake in Amboseli in the 1960s (Lwezaula 1970), and dialogue between the Maasai and the Ministry of

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Tourism and Wildlife had been common practice prior to 1980–81. Why, then, did success falter after the first phase? The failure can be directly attributed to the Wildlife and Conservation Management Department. The department was progressively starved of funds as other national priorities took precedence over wildlife. Total park expenditures slumped and by the mid-1980s were less than Ksh150,000 (US$8,000) a year—about 1 percent of the park’s gross income. Allocations for the pipeline dropped from Ksh300,000 (US$16,000) per year to Ksh30,000 (US$1,600). Finally, WCMD refused to operate the southern boreholes, and the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife no longer honored the wildlife utilization fee. Even more than financial privation, developments within the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department were to blame for the problems at Amboseli. The department quickly lost its best officers due to paltry salaries, deepening corruption, poaching, and nepotism. Blame fell on the newly appointed director, Daniel Sindiyo, and there is no doubt that he failed to fulfill his early promise. But he was powerless without funds and snared in a web of corruption. Many of the nepotistic appointees in the department were behind elephant poaching. Sindiyo became more withdrawn and isolated and failed to halt the free-fall in WCMD. Bad as it was, WCMD was not exceptional as a government department during this period of deepening economic crisis and countrywide political malaise. In addition, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife had never fully subscribed to the 1975 policies and the specific commitments it made to Amboseli. The reasons were perceptual as much as political. The ministry had been coerced to change its policy more than convinced to do so. As a result, strong antipathy to local involvement remained within the ministry. A great deal more effort on public relations might have made a difference. Too much emphasis had been placed on proving the case for the plan on the ground and not enough effort expended on raising political awareness and commitment at governmental level in Nairobi. Amboseli, as a result, was left isolated and with no institutional backing. Ironically, the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department’s failure and the social and economic trends among the Maasai sparked the first genuine local initiatives. Oloitiptip’s political demise in the early 1980s and subsequent death were contributory factors. With no single voice to speak on behalf of the Maasai, they began to speak and act for themselves. A preoccupation with their individual lives and lack of experience in community projects had restrained the Amboseli Maasai from embarking on their own wildlife projects. After several years in which my role had become little more than advisory, I became reinvolved. This time I concentrated on stimulating self-help programs by working with the officially elected group ranch committees. David Maitumo, my Maasai field assistant since 1977 and a member of the local community, was to play a significant role. The committee responded quickly to the renewed suggestion of taking over the public campsite, but the elders continued to resist. The new generation of elders,

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however, included Ole Musa and two younger, educated Maasai, John Marinka and Jonathan Leboo, who worked at Serena Lodge in Amboseli. They were persuasive, pointing out the closing livestock options, made all the more obvious by the 1970s drought, and the wildlife alternatives. Marinka and Leboo, with their tourism training, left their jobs to run the public campsite and improve the facilities. By 1987 the campsite was earning in excess of Ksh300,000 (US$18,000) per year. A second initiative involved an electrified fence at Namelok, an area that the Maasai had settled and farmed during the 1970s drought. Maasai farmers began growing subsistence crops at first, and then cash crops for market. While the gardens diversified Maasai income and relieved pressure on the grazing lands, more than half of their crop was being destroyed by elephants, buffalo, and other herbivores. I urged the Maasai to put up a solar electric fence to protect their crops. The farmers were to erect the fence under David Maitumo’s supervision and subsequently maintain it themselves. Half the funds would be raised by the community and the other half through conservation donors. The Wildlife Extension Project of WCMD initially tried to organize the fence program through a full community-participation approach involving workshops and seminars (Berger 1989). While the project did involve a large cross-section of the community in discussion, it failed to get the fence constructed. The failure resulted from a misunderstanding of both traditional leadership (Hannah 1992) and the role a handful of progressive Maasai played in catalyzing development. Subsequent work with the committee of one group ranch, Ogulului, and a group of progressive elders resulted in a smaller demonstration fence set up around their own farms. This example quickly got the fencing program off the ground. The Ogulului group contracted farm laborers to build and maintain the fence under Maitumo’s direction. Its rapid completion and demonstrable success in keeping wildlife out of crops influenced the rest of the community to follow suit. A third project involved developing a tourist concession on Ogulului. Although I initiated the project and brought in the three prospective tour operators, the group ranch committee negotiated the Ksh500,000 (US$20,000) annual contract and has run the concession on its own since 1988. During this period, Kimana and Mbirikani group ranches reached similar agreements with other tourist concessionaires, as did Selengei Group Ranch with a bird-hunting consortium. By 1992, the four group ranches had initiated seven wildlife concessions with little or no government involvement. Thus the mid-1980s saw a basic shift in the level and nature of Maasai participation in the Amboseli plan. The first-phase response to plans drawn up with the Maasai’s input and for their benefit was soon superseded by self-initiated projects. While the full community may not have participated, the initiative undeniably came from the Maasai, both leaders and progressive individuals, with the backing of the community at large. The self-help conservation programs in the second phase purposely mimicked the successful agricultural programs that had diversified the

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Maasai economy in the 1970s (see PARTICIPATION), often even involving the same individuals. These initiatives, self-generated wildlife income, and the expectation of renewed benefits from the park accounted for the Amboseli Maasai’s tolerance of wildlife. At a time of heavy poaching elsewhere in Kenya, wildlife increased in Amboseli throughout the 1980s. The increase was especially evident in the case of elephants (see Figure 2.5). Mara, the other exception to wildlife’s general decline, had similar projects in place. In other words, despite the failure of the government program, WCMD’s contribution to the collapse of park infrastructure, and a much-publicized poaching scandal (Douglas-Hamilton and Douglas-Hamilton 1992), the Maasai’s own wildlife programs sustained and improved their development activities as well as wildlife numbers.

Phase 3, 1987–1992: New Institutions and New Initiatives The failure of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department and the collapse of elephant populations in Kenya became a national scandal by the late 1980s. WCMD’s performance in Amboseli helped to persuade President Moi to make sweeping personnel and institutional reforms in 1987. Sindiyo was replaced by Perez Olindo, and the principles of local participation became a central plank in the terms of reference drawn up in 1988 for the Kenya Wildlife Service, which replaced WCMD in 1990. The word Service was purposefully included in the parastatal KWS’s name to convey a sense of the contributions the new institution would be expected to make to the welfare of rural communities. KWS, borrowing from some of the successful features of the former Kenya National Parks, has an independent board of trustees and direct control over its own revenues and expenditures. The main reasons for the failure of WCMD—lack of control over the funds it earned, lack of accountability, corruption, and nepotism—are, to a great extent, redressed within the new KWS institutional structure. When Richard Leakey became director of WCMD in 1989 to oversee the launching of KWS, he initially announced his intention to fence all parks in the interest of protecting people from wildlife depredations and wildlife from poachers. This policy would have been disastrous biologically, due to insularization effects (MacArthur and Wilson 1967). Equally as important, fencing would have reversed the entire policy of local participation and severely reduced Kenya’s wildlife tourism capacity. Fortunately, the fledgling KWS soon came out in favor of keeping park boundaries open where possible. By announcing a national revenue-sharing plan, it reinforced the policy of local participation. A meeting convened in Amboseli in January 1990 by the warden and Wildlife Conservation International (the conservation division of the New York Zoological Society) quickly established dialogue between the group ranches, represented by forty members, and KWS. The workshop also involved other government agencies including the Ministry of Livestock Development. Broad agreements reached at

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the end of the two-day meeting included the need to resume revenue dispersal, reestablish a wildlife committee, allow for elephant migration from Kilimanjaro, and set up a system of local Maasai scouts to protect wildlife. It is still too early to gauge the impact of the new community programs, but there is reason to believe that they will succeed, despite some initial setbacks. For example, although KWS promised to share 25 percent of the gate receipts from Amboseli with the ranch members, in reality, little more than half that amount, or roughly half the opportunity cost to the ranches, has been disbursed to date. The first payments were delayed by squabbles between the group ranches over how the payments should be apportioned. Further setbacks occurred when KWS refused to acknowledge the boundary realignments of 1973 (which would have allowed Maasai livestock access to swamps in the drought of 1992) or to assume responsibility for the southern boreholes. The wildlife committee has yet to be reestablished, and KWS is still inclined to make decisions unilaterally. Revenuesharing programs are in a formative, ad hoc stage, and the important link between landowners’ opportunity costs and benefits with respect to wildlife has not been made. There is, in short, little connection between the revenue-sharing programs and the conservation costs incurred in conserving the larger Amboseli ecosystem. Despite the setbacks, successes are beginning to outweigh failures. Perhaps the most important factor in the successes is the changing balance of authority as the local Maasai realize their rights and begin to exercise them politically. One example is the assertiveness Ogulului Group Ranch showed in canvassing politically in Nairobi. A strongly worded letter to the director of KWS threatened to fence off the park unless they were given their legal share of the gate income. Such assertiveness paid off: The Amboseli group ranches were the first to benefit under KWS’s revenue-sharing program. Another measure of success is the Maasai’s determination to resist subdivision of Ogulului Ranch in the interest of keeping the wildlife migratory routes intact and deriving wildlife revenues. The annual general meeting of the group ranch passed a resolution that only a small portion of the ranch on the arable slopes of Kilimanjaro would be subdivided for settlement, leaving the rest open to livestock and wildlife. There are other measures as well. The four group ranches have set up a system of twenty game scouts, paid for with money from the revenue-sharing program, to protect wildlife on ranch land. Kimana and Mbirikani ranches have launched plans for their own electric fences to protect irrigated cropland east of Amboseli. New tourist concessions for Ogulului and a wildlife cropping scheme for Mbirikani are under discussion. The four schools on Ogulului have been built wholly or in part with wildlife revenues. The new relationship between the Maasai and the official wildlife custodian, Kenya Wildlife Service, has been gaining strength. KWS is beginning to show commitment and the capacity to implement the community-based conservation programs needed in Amboseli and countrywide. KWS initially focused on

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antipoaching and security measures to reassure a tourist industry wary of rampant poaching and tourist assaults. KWS has been successful in these tasks. More recently, KWS has turned its attention to community-based conservation, establishing and securing funds for its own Community Wildlife Service and training programs. It also has begun to initiate several wildlife-utilization schemes on private land and group ranches. In 1993, however, the Maasai, dissatisfied with KWS’s performance and its reluctance to push ahead with policy reforms, set up their own wildlife association. The new association includes Kuku and Rombo group ranches, which separate Amboseli from Tsavo West National Park. The association will pursue its own conservation programs, emphasizing the strong historical association between Maasai culture and wildlife. The association expects to draw up land-use plans to balance conservation and development. Legal contracts with KWS will form the basis of all agreements between the two parties. In this present phase, strong empirical evidence shows that the original aim of maintaining the integrity of the Amboseli ecosystem and improving the welfare of the Maasai landowners is being achieved. Poaching levels remain low, attitudes toward wildlife are fairly positive, and wildlife income is steadily becoming a more significant component of Maasai income (see Figure 2.6).

Evaluation The Amboseli program is enormously complex and beset with conflicts and problems. This has been partly because of the choice of Amboseli itself as a place to test new locally based approaches to conservation. Amboseli in the 1960s and ’70s was the most controversial wildlife area in Kenya and presented a difficult challenge in resolving the clash of human and wildlife interests in the savannas. The very intensity of the clash over Amboseli and the intertwined ecologies of the Maasai and wildlife ruled out a hard-edged national park, which simply never would have worked. Had a small area been set aside, the ecosystem would not have survived, nor would there have been the increase in wildlife seen during the last fifteen years. The Amboseli program should be judged by comparison with other ecosystems in Kenya, most of which have experienced both a decline in wildlife numbers and increasingly negative local attitudes toward wild animals. The success of the program, measured against its original goals, is that new conservation approaches and policies bearing on reconciling human and wildlife interests did emerge. These principles also helped to maintain the integrity of the Amboseli ecosystem and improve prospects for both wildlife and the Maasai. There can be little doubt that the Amboseli program played an important role in changing national policies and had an international impact in bringing about recognition and acceptance of the need to direct conservation benefits to local communities (Hannah 1992). However, the eight years consumed in promoting and implementing the new

Figure 2.6

16

14

W I L D L I F E B I O M A S S ( k g p e r k m 2)

12

10

8 Total Wildlife Income

6

Park Disbursements

Livestock Income

4

Concession Earnings

2

0 1975

1980

1985

1990

YEAR

Income accruing to Maasai landowners in the Amboseli ecosystem. Livestock income is based on subsistence and commercial value. Wildlife income includes money accruing from the park, tourist concessions, hunting concessions, and miscellaneous other sources.

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policies added a level of complexity to the Amboseli program that later integrated projects have been spared. The success of Amboseli hinged on new and untried policies, a new wildlife institution, and innovative management practices. In short, the Amboseli program depended on changing attitudes at the top as much as on the ground. How well, then, did the program meet its original objectives? Ecologically, the success of the program can be judged by data derived from the monitoring program set up to evaluate trends. The data show that the ecosystem has remained open, migrations are viable, and populations are healthy (see Figures 2.1, 2.4, and 2.5). The main reason for the increase of elephants numbers in Amboseli, in the face of a continental plunge (Douglas-Hamilton and Douglas-Hamilton 1992), is the protection the Maasai have given the animals (Moss 1988). The Maasai also have benefited in demonstrable ways (see Figure 2.6), although less than they should have on the basis of equitable distribution of costs and benefits. During the early implementation phase, wildlife income and other benefits contributed to Maasai welfare at a time of difficult cultural and economic transition (Figure 2.3). These benefits are now being reestablished under KWS’s revenue-sharing program (Figure 2.6). Other measures of success can be seen in changes in attitudes and concrete achievements generated by the program—for example, Ogulului’s decision not to subdivide the nonarable portion of the ranch in the interest of securing greater wildlife income; the ranches’ provision, deployment, and payment of twenty Maasai scouts to protect wildlife outside the park; construction of schools and other facilities with wildlife income; and creation of tourist concessions negotiated and run by the Maasai. It is worth restating that the original locally based plan failed. The Maasai (understandably, given their history) could not sufficiently overcome their phobia of land loss and suspicion of wildlife preservationism to come to grips with the socioeconomic realities and alternatives the initial plan offered. The follow-on stage was complex, involving a combination of top-end and open-dialogue approaches once the broad principles were in place. Analysis of Amboseli emphasizes the point that many factors, some strongly interlinked, account for the successes and failures. Individuals played an allimportant part in the Amboseli program at the outset. Ideas, initiative, and continuity all came from individuals who were motivated by the vision of a new locally based approach to conservation and development. These individuals, including Sindiyo, Ole Purdul, Ole Musa, Marinka, Leboo, Mitchell, Kioko, myself, and several others, were key players who worked together closely, often against national and local resistance. They became the focal point for the distillation and integration of ideas and helped the program survive and move ahead when the institutional framework failed in the post-1981 period. These same individuals, working cooperatively, provided the program’s give-and-take dynamic. The iterative learning process became one of the program’s survival tactics and a way of ensuring practical flexibility.

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The use of ecological information, Maasai knowledge, economic analyses, and land-use assessments also proved important in looking at the options and trying to resolve conflicting interests. The support of an international organization—the New York Zoological Society—was decisive at many points, particularly in giving the new policies credibility and the entire program financial and institutional support over an unusually long period. Here, too, the participation of key individuals, including Royal Little, Bill Conway, Charlie Nichols, and Barclay Morrison, extended far beyond the confines of their institutions. Unquestionably, the biggest single failing was at governmental and institutional levels. The strong persistence of colonial preservationist policies, coupled with a continuing paternalistic attitude toward nomadic pastoralists among senior administrators, put the brakes on open dialogue. And once the new policies were in place, the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department as an institution proved disastrous for wildlife. Some reviews (Lindsay 1987; Talbot and Olindo 1990) sidestep this politically sensitive topic and look to other explanations. The reality is that WCMD became such a national and international scandal that it took presidential intervention to scrap the department and start again with a new institution, the Kenya Wildlife Service. If institutional shortcomings led the government to abrogate its part of the Amboseli agreements, local initiatives ultimately sustained the economic link between Maasai and wildlife welfare. The Maasai’s local initiatives, and the direct income that resulted, were the deciding factors in sustaining the program, albeit at a much lower level than planned. That the Maasai gained some benefits during this time probably mattered more than whether the sum they received exceeded their losses. These benefits, and the expectation of more in the future as their livestock options narrowed, were an important element in sustaining Maasai commitment to wildlife conservation. The initiative and participation in turn depended not on the involvement of the entire community, but on traditional leadership and new institutional structures. A few individuals constituted the driving force among the Maasai no less than in government. And yet, to an important degree, the cohesiveness of traditional Maasai society made and continues to make consensus possible and binding. The collective memory and obligation of the Maasai was far greater than that of government officers, whether permanent secretaries or wardens. As these officers came and went, the Maasai collective commitment endured. Two final points, linkage and enforcement, need mention. Stronger linkage and enforcement would have strengthened the program considerably. The fact that weak linkage and enforcement did not undermine the program needs some explanation. The link between Maasai benefits and wildlife conservation was fairly explicit in the Development Plans for Amboseli, to the extent that the wildlife utilization fee was tied to opportunity costs and the Maasai’s impact on wildlife. An ecological monitoring project was set up to track the outcome and adjust the fees. The link was also explicit in terms of the agreement under which the Maasai

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vacated the park. That linkage broke down when the government abrogated the agreement unilaterally. Linkage of benefits and wildlife conservation has yet to be reestablished under the terms of the new revenue-sharing program. Failure to secure control over the council land at Ol Tukai in return for a management fee is another example of weak linkage. The council recently approved plans for a third lodge on the already crowded 156 ha, despite opposition from the local Maasai and KWS. For the most part, the link between Maasai benefits and wildlife survival has been implicit, rather than explicit. This did not matter much under traditional and relatively benign Maasai herding practices. It will matter a great deal more as the Maasai settle, fence, build upon, and physically develop their land. Enforcement without doubt has been the weakest element in the entire program. Little has been done in the way of antipoaching since the original Amboseli Game Reserve was established in 1947. That laxity saw rhino numbers fall from 75 in 1967 to 8 in 1977 (Western 1982b) and elephants from more than 1,000 to about 480 over the same period. That elephants (and, for a brief period, rhinos) subsequently recovered, despite the lack of patrols, is a measure of Maasai tolerance. The attitudinal change did more to conserve elephants in Amboseli than law enforcement achieved elsewhere in Kenya. Amboseli and Mara make the point that community programs can minimize the need for law enforcement and reduce management costs substantially. But, as with the question of linkage, enforcement will be increasingly necessary as the traditional interaction of the Maasai and wildlife changes with development and new aspirations. Enforcement will be needed to keep wildlife out of Maasai farms, livestock out of the park, and poaching levels to a minimum—a reality the Maasai recognized when they commissioned twenty of their own scouts to protect wildlife on their ranches.

Pointers for the Future The effects of political and economic liberalization on Maasai values and aspirations, as well as other inevitable changes, will present a challenge for communitybased conservation in Amboseli. Future successes may well depend on local people’s ability to adapt to change. Effects of Political and Economic Liberalization The maintenance of a viable ecosystem in Amboseli has succeeded to a great extent due to the traditionally benign relationship between the Maasai and wildlife. The community, although heterogeneous at the individual level, was unified to a far greater degree than most due to the demands of subsistence pastoralism, the strong cultural ideals of the Maasai, and traditional means of arbitrating disputes (Spencer 1988). The ecological benignity and relative cultural homogeneity was implicit in the early plans for Amboseli. Neither ecological nor cultural factors favoring coexistence will persist in the face of development, however. Individual economic and political interests will diverge progressively with

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the adoption of new life-styles, formal education, and changing aspirations (Kituyi 1990). Political and economic liberalization will further encourage demands for land and property rights that include wildlife utilization. The trend toward individual land ownership will continue over much and possibly all of the ecosystem as the subsistence livestock economy diminishes in importance. The trends inevitably will accelerate the diversification of Maasai interests and voices. The relative homogeneity of interests will give way to a far more heterogeneous community—farmers, ranch members, wildlife entrepreneurs, traders, transporters, teachers, etc.—and one less easily represented by a few voices. The present system of representation is already proving inadequate; some spokesmen, for example, are siphoning off much of the wildlife income destined for the community at large. The monetary benefits clearly will have to reach all members of the community and, in the process, risk dilution. The cultural, economic, and political transition under way in Maasailand is the single biggest challenge to future integrated planning for the Amboseli ecosystem. KWS and the Maasai increasingly will have to meet on equal terms, not on the paternalistic basis that dominated WCMD’s attitude and KWS’s formative approaches. Wildlife inevitably will become one of several Maasai interests rather than the only alternative to livestock. Land-use planning to balance the expanding range of interests will become imperative. The challenge to KWS is to adapt to the new reality of landowner rights and interests and see to it that wildlife opportunities are realized. Its interest, however, should continue to focus on the viability of the ecosystem. This will entail more and more involvement with other agencies and landowners, in the interest of less and less direct wildlife management. The alternative, a retreat to the confines of the park, will mean intensive wildlife management and the loss of ecological integrity and naturalness, the point most visitors value above all else (Gakahu 1992). The park, after all, was designed not as a self-sufficient unit but as part of a multiple land-use system (Western 1969a, 1973). To believe that wildlife will be conserved for its own sake as long as Maasai traditions survive is unrealistic. The biggest challenge lies in continuing to find ways to accommodate both interests and in maintaining a large arena of physical overlap based on economic and noneconomic values that are meaningful to landowners. This will mean exploring development opportunities and reducing conflicts of interest when they arise. Formal plans and written contracts, already proposed by the Maasai, should become the focus of mutual endeavors. And, inasmuch as the type and nature of conflict will continually change as the Maasai themselves change, the plans and contracts will have to be continually revised. Adaptability and Change The conservation of Amboseli will require adaptability and change. Inevitably, the nature of benefits will have to change from communal to individual. Only so many schools and social services can be built around Amboseli, for example, and

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not everyone benefits from these. The ranches already are thinking of direct benefits to individuals in the form of cash handouts. Under such a system, each landowner would become a shareholder in commonly held stock (wildlife), which would yield annual dividends. Finally, KWS will have to manage wildlife in the interest of maintaining biodiversity and ecological integrity as the dynamic ecological processes that maintain diversity weaken. Much as management is anathema to many conservationists, it becomes a necessity when human activity threatens these essential processes (Western and Gichohi 1993). An overpopulation of elephants in the park, partly due to the demise of their seasonal migration (Western 1989), has severely reduced Amboseli’s biological diversity and caused great hardship to Maasai farmers close by. There is no longer sufficient open space to absorb the elephant population, and management, in one form or another, will be essential if biodiversity is to be maintained. Much the same can be said of the greatly expanded migratory herds of wildebeest and zebra. Utilization in one form or another not only will ease the conflict between wildlife and herder but will help contribute greater financial benefit to Maasai living away from the park, where there is no prospect of tourist income. KWS has been loath to implement utilization policies but is gradually considering doing so at the urging of landowners.

SOURCES Berger, J. 1989. “Wildlife Extension: A Participatory Approach to Conservation.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Botkin, D. 1990. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Douglas-Hamilton, I., and O. Douglas-Hamilton. 1992. Battle for the Elephants. New York: Doubleday. Galaty, J. 1982. “Being ‘Maasai,’ Being ‘People of Cattle’: Ethnic Shifters in East Africa.” American Ethnologist 9: 1–20. ———, and P. C. Salzman, eds. 1980. Changes and Development in Nomadic Pastoral Societies. Leiden, Holland: Brille. Gakahu, C. G., ed. 1992. Tourist Attitudes and Use Impacts in Maasai Mara National Reserve. Nairobi: English Press. Government of Kenya (GoK). 1977. The Wildlife Act. Nairobi: Government Printer. Grandon, B. E. 1991. “The Maasai: Socio-historical Context and Group Ranches.” In An Analysis of the Livestock Production System of Maasai Pastoralists in Eastern Kajiado District, Kenya. Addis Ababa: International Livestock Centre for Africa. Hannah, L. 1992. African People, African Parks. Washington, D.C.: Conservation International. Jacobs, A. 1975. “The Traditional Political Organization of the Pastoral Maasai.” Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University.

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Kantai, B. 1971. “Foreword.” In The Maasai, by S. Sankan, vii–xxxi. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau. Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). 1991. Amboseli National Park Management Plan (1991–1996). Nairobi: Kenya Wildlife Service. Kituyi, M. 1990. Becoming Kenyans: Socio-economic Transformation of the Pastoral Maasai. Nairobi: ACTS Press. Lahi, A. V. 1967. Hydrology of Sinya Meerschaum Mine. Dar es Salaam: Institute for Study and Development. Lindsay, W. K. 1987. “Integrating Parks and Pastoralists: Some Lessons from Amboseli.” In Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice, ed. D. Anderson and R. Grove, 149–167. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Lwezaula, F. M. R. 1970. Analysis of Problems in Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve. Mweka, Tanzania: College of African Wildlife Management. MacArthur, R. H., and E. O. Wilson. 1967. The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Marshall, F. 1989. “Rethinking the Role of Bos indicus in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Current Anthropology 30(2): 235–246. Mitchell, F. 1969. Forecasts of Returns to Kajiado County Council from the Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve. Institute for Development Studies Discussion Paper No. 87. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. Moss, C. 1988. Elephant Memories. London: Elm Tree. Ochilo, J. A. 1991. “Implications of Landuse Changes: Amboseli Biosphere Reserve Buffer Zone (Kenya).” Master’s thesis, Institute of Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences, Enschede, Holland. Pratt, D. J., P. J. Greenway, and M. O. Gwynne. 1966. “A Classification of East African Rangelands.” Journal of Applied Ecology 3:369–382. Program for Better Family Living (PBFL). 1977a. Kajiado District Workshop Report on Wildlife Conservation and Management Held at Amboseli National Park, Nairobi. Paper No. 34. Nairobi: Program for Better Family Living. ———. 1977b. Loitokitok Workshop on Wildlife and Local Communities, Nairobi. Nairobi: Program for Better Family Living. Sankan, S. 1971. The Maasai. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau. Sessional Paper Number 2. Wildlife Policy 1975. Government Printer, Nairobi. Simon, N. M. 1962. Between the Sunlight and the Thunder. London: Collins. Sindiyo, D. M. 1968. “Game Department Field Experience in Public Education.” East African Agriculture and Forestry Journal 33: 237–240. Spencer, P. 1988. The Maasai of Matapatu. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press. Talbot, L., and P. Olindo. 1990. “Amboseli and Maasai Mara, Kenya.” In Living with Wildlife: Wildlife Resource Management with Local Participation in Africa, ed. A. Kiss, 67–74. World Bank Technical Paper No. 30. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Western, D. 1969a. Landuse in Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve: A Case Study for Interdisciplinary Cooperation. Institute for Development Studies Research Bulletin No. 40. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. ———. 1969b. “Amboseli.” Africana 3(12):17–20.

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———. 1970. Proposal for an Amboseli Game Park. Institute for Development Studies Research Bulletin No. 53. Nairobi: Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. ———. 1973. “The Structure, Dynamics and Changes of the Amboseli Ecosystem.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nairobi. ———. 1975. “Water Availability and Its influence on the Structure and Dynamics of a Savannah Large-mammal Community.” East African Wildlife Journal 13: 265–287. ———. 1982a. “Amboseli National Park: Enlisting Land Owners to Conserve Migratory Wildlife.” Ambio 11(5): 302–308. ———. 1982b. “Patterns of Depletion in a Kenya Rhino Population and the Conservation Implications.” Biological Conservation 24: 147–156. ———. 1989. “The Ecological Value of Elephants: A Keystone Role in African Ecosystems.” In The Ivory Trade and the Future of the African Elephant, section 5.2. Oxford, England: Ivory Trade Review Group. ———, and T. Dunne. 1979. “Environmental Aspects of Settlement Site Decisions among Pastoral Maasai.” Human Ecology 7(1):75–98. ———, and V. Finch. 1986. “Cattle and Pastoralism: Survival and Production in Arid Lands.” Human Ecology 14(1):77–94. ———, and H. Gichohi. 1993. “Segregation Effects and the Impoverishment of Savanna Ecosystems: The Case for Ecosystem Viability Analysis.” African Journal of Ecology 31:268–271. ———, and W. K. Lindsay. 1984. “Seasonal Herd Dynamics of a Savanna Elephant Population.” African Journal of Ecology 22:229–244. ———, and D. M. Sindiyo. 1972. “The Status of the Amboseli Rhino Population.” East African Wildlife Journal 12(1):43–57. ———, and P. Thresher. 1973. Development Plans for Amboseli. World Bank Report. Nairobi: World Bank. ———, and C. van Praet. 1973. “Cyclical Changes in the Habitat and Climate of an East African Ecosystem.” Nature 241:104–106. Williams, L. A. J. 1967. “The Kilimanjaro Volcanic Rocks of the Amboseli Area.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nairobi. Yeager, R., and N. N. Miller. 1986. Wildlife, Wild Death, Land Use and Survival in East Africa. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Resurgence of Community Forest Management in Eastern India Mark Poffenberger

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, large areas of forest throughout the Indian subcontinent have been declared designated public land. These lands were placed under the management of state forest departments for production and protection purposes. Millions of rural inhabitants throughout India who had utilized these lands to meet basic needs for food, fuel, building materials, fibers, and medicines effectively lost their access rights. By 1980, nearly 23 percent of India’s land area had been placed under state management, displacing an estimated 300 million rural resource users. As the rights of rural communities eroded, conflicts between state agencies and Indian villagers became increasingly evident. Disagreements over management priorities led to unsustainable patterns of forest exploitation and gradual degradation of India’s vast forests. By 1990, less than 10 percent of the country possessed good forest cover. During the last few years, planners and forest administrators have begun developing new policies to reduce the conflict between the state agencies and rural groups responsible for this resource crisis. These policies are designed to facilitate the emergence of collaborative forest-management systems that respond to national needs and local resource requirements. In eastern India, between six thousand and eight thousand villages have begun patrolling and protecting hundreds of thousands of hectares of degraded forest as part of the new comanagement (usually referred to as joint management in India) policies, often with dramatic results in terms of forest regeneration. The community or cooperative forest-management systems emerging in West Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa (see Map 3.1) promise an alternative to the custodial policing systems of the past. They require a shift from commercial timber exploitation to the sustainable use of many nontimber products. They necessitate a move from centralized planning and bureaucratic management to decentralized community-based management. Currently, little is known regarding the structure and function of these community-based management groups, or about the processes through which they form forest protection committees. 53

Map 3.1 Kanpur

NEPAL

Gorakhpur

Allahabad

Gang

es

Varanasi

R.

Bhagalpur BANGLADESH

MADHYA PRADESH

BIHAR WEST BENGAL

Calcutta Chandana

INDIA

Budikhamari

Mahapada

ORISSA

Bhubaneshwar

Bay of Bengal ANDHRA PRADESH

Eastern India

KEY State Capitals Case Study Areas Areas with Extensive Community Forest Management Activity

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INDIA

55

The dearth of information prompted the commissioning of the two rapid diagnostic case studies presented here. The case studies were conducted by members of the Indian National Support Group for Joint Forest Management (NSG) during field visits from 1990 to 1993. (The NSG’s objective is to disseminate learning from grass-roots movements and forest department programs that promote communitybased resource conservation and management.) The NSG field researchers held discussions with community members and leaders, nongovernmental organization staff, and field foresters about forest comanagement activities in West Bengal and Orissa. A summary of their findings follows.

Community Forest Management in Southwest Bengal Chandana and Harinakuri villages are located approximately 20 km south of Kharagpur, in the state of West Bengal. A 2-km dirt track off the main road crosses rain-fed rice fields and passes through regenerating forest lands on the way to Chandana village. Another kilometer down the road bordering the southern extension of the forest is Harinakuri village. The forest lands in the Chandana area total 160 ha; Chandana and Harinakuri villages border the forest on the south, and Nidata and Babunmara villages in the north (see Map 3.2). Most of the villages in the area are inhabited by members of low-income scheduled castes (social groups that are outside the dominant majority of the caste system), tribals, and farming-caste families. Chandana village has thirty-eight households. Of these, half are Bhumi tribals and the rest members of scheduled castes, including oil makers. In Harinakuri, the thirty-one families are primarily of the Naik scheduled caste (untouchables also known as harijans). The Naik claim to have worked as mercenaries for a local raja until approximately one hundred years ago, when they moved into this forest area. At that time a large landowner, or zamindar, was opening the area for agriculture. Most of the villagers worked as agricultural laborers and tenant farmers until the state land-reform program of the early to mid-1970s granted them title in local rain-fed rice lands. Historically, these communities have depended on the neighboring forest lands in significant ways for fuel, fodder, supplemental food, medicines, and fibers.

Chandana Forest Management History According to Lokhun Sahu, a sixty-five-year-old Chandana villager, the surrounding forest was once comprised primarily of first-growth sal (Shorea robusta) trees. During the years of British colonial rule, a zamindar named Bhuwan Chandra Pal, who lived 20 km away in Hundla, near Narayangar, controlled the forest tracts of Chandana. In part to pay his taxes to the British raj, the zamindar periodically leased tracts of jungle to contractors for logging. During the felling,

Map 3.2

To Kharagpur 20 km Babunmara Village

Rain-fed Rice Land Nidata Village DEGRADED SAL

EUCALYPTUS PLANTATION

100 ha REGENERATING SAL FOREST: 7-8 years protection

Chandana Village

DEGRADED SAL FOREST

Chandana Village and Protected Forests

56

60 ha REGENERATING SAL FOREST: 3-4 years protection

Rain-fed Rice Land

Harinakuri Village

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57

local villagers were allowed to purchase lops and tops for fuelwood at the rate of Rs1 or 2 (US$.03 to $.06) per cartload. The zamindar didn’t allow villagers to cut poles or logs and posted guards to protect the forest against local users. Periodically, the zamindar sent his men into the village to see if they had hidden poles or timber. The guards beat anyone found to have stolen wood, sometimes fatally. After a contractor finished logging his concession, the sal trees sent up coppice growth, and the forest reestablished itself. Older trees, including sal, mahua, and cashew were left to act as seed and fruit sources. Little changed in forest-management practice during the early years following Independence in 1947. The zamindar continued to control the forest of Chandana until the early 1950s, when the Zamindar Abolition Law was passed. The new law gave the West Bengal Forest Department an opportunity to establish direct control over the forest lands of the southwestern part of the state. But first, seeing that he was about to lose control of the forest, the zamindar sold off the entire Chandana forest tract to contractors who felled the area, leaving only a few fruit trees. For the next six months, local communities faced a severe shortage of fuelwood. As coppice growth emerged, the forest resource supply also began to recover. From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, the West Bengal Forest Department exerted control over the forests of Chandana. Throughout this period, the department continued the practices of the zamindars by leasing cutting rights to contractors. Consequently, sal trees were cut every ten to fifteen years and regenerated after a few years through coppice growth. The local field officer complained that the contractors often also cut the older sal and fruit trees. This practice is officially banned, as these mature trees, or standards, are important yielders of seeds for natural regeneration. When the forest guards or villagers attempted to stop the contractors, they were threatened by armed guards. The contractors reportedly enjoyed political support, so the field staff and villagers could do little to stop them. According to Lokhun Sahu, political organizers began visiting the community in the early 1970s. They told the villagers that the forest was community property. In retrospect, Lokhun feels that “the political leaders misled the people to gain their political support.” The villagers began cutting and selling trees indiscriminately. According to Lokhun, no control system existed, and everyone cut where they pleased. Lacking support from the community and threatened with physical violence by the contractors, the forestry field staff was helpless. By the early 1980s, the sal forests were badly degraded. In some areas, even the trees’ root systems had been extracted for fuelwood. Lokhun reports that, with this degradation, the temperature seemed to become hotter, while rainfall diminished, and the earth became drier. The cooling breezes ceased to blow. The villagers had difficulty finding wood for their spade handles, plows, and other agricultural implements. The village ponds and well dried up faster, and the villagers had to rely on water from the river 2 km away. The forest had been so thoroughly cut that there were no standing trees outside the village environs. It was possible to see all the way to the river and beyond.

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In 1983, Jyoti Naik, a man from the neighboring village of Harinakuri, began visiting Chandana village to discuss forest-management problems. Jyoti is a fortyfive-year-old small farmer with only two years of formal education. He was convinced that some action had to be taken to reverse the process of forest destruction. Jyoti had been a landless laborer until the CPIM (Communist Party of India Marxist), which controlled the West Bengal state government, implemented a land-reform program in the 1970s. At that time, Jyoti and other families in his village gained small tracts of farmland. He felt that since the community now controlled its agricultural land, it should also manage its forest resources as well. In the beginning, Jyoti visited each house separately in the evenings to talk about the problem. He told the villagers of Chandana that if they didn’t begin protecting the forest, it would degrade to a point where even fuelwood and leaves no longer would be available. He told them they would be forest people with no forest, and their children would have no forest resources to utilize in their adulthood. Gradually, he began organizing village-level meetings. By 1984, a sufficient number of Chandana villagers were ready to call a meeting with the three neighboring villages to discuss a collaborative management program. At the meeting, each community decided to take responsibility for the forest area nearest its village. The subdivision of the 160-ha forest tract tended to follow footpaths and bullock cart tracks. Chandana and Harinakuri villages began actively protecting the forest tracts near their communities. The villages to the north of the forest, Nidata and Babunmara, were less effective in controlling access, and commercial fuelwood cutting continued. Jyoti Naik and other village leaders since have met with local political representatives from the area and urged them to put pressure on the northside communities to begin protection activities. Jyoti says that the politicians are afraid they will lose votes if they do so. At present, however, a four-village forest protection committee coordinating board does exist. Jyoti Naik currently acts as chairman.

Experiences with Protection Activities Outside pressures on the forest protected by the Chandana community continue. Women from other villages come in groups of five or six every two or three days to cut fuelwood. These women frequently come from Bhetia village across the river to the north, or from Pora and Simildanga villages in the south. When Chandana villagers catch the woodcutters, they ask them to go elsewhere; when necessary, they chase the women away with sticks. A more serious threat is from gangs of ten to twelve men who come in the night during the months from August through October and February through May, slack times in the agricultural season. These groups come to cut sal poles for commercial sale. When outside cutting groups are active, the Chandana Forest Protection Committee tends to keep one man patrolling the area on two- to three-hour shifts. Other

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villagers are also watchful and notify the committee if cutting groups are seen approaching the area. Occasionally, the forest protection committee catches groups in the process of cutting. They then confiscate the men’s axes and fine them. Protection experiences in the neighboring village of Harinakuri are similar. Since the Harinakuri Forest Protection Committee was formed in 1979, Harinakuri has worked with neighboring Chandana and Telebanga villages to protect against cutting groups from villages to the north and east. According to Jyoti, pressure from outside villages is particularly high because many members of these communities depend on fuelwood sales as their primary source of cash income. Often tribal and scheduled caste members of these villages are contracted by highcaste families in towns and villages and at the Soluwa Army Base to cut fuelwood and timber for them. The cutting groups often band together to overcome local resistance. In response, the Harinakuri Forest Protection Committee has to patrol in groups of eight to ten men armed with bows and arrows and spears. Boys with grazing animals also watch and listen for the sound of ax upon tree when cutting groups are active, so that they can warn the forest protection committee. When this occurs, the men attempt to encircle the cutting group so that they can catch them. In these cases, they turn offenders over to the forest department guard, which later fines the woodcutters.

Economic Costs of Protection Jyoti believes the decision to protect the degraded forest land has had a significant impact on the economy of Harinakuri. Previously, Jyoti and the other villagers also had been engaged in cutting fuelwood for sale. If a number of family members were engaged in cutting, a household might collect two or three 40- to 50-kg bundles of wood each day. In 1979, these quantities generated Rs35 to 50 (US$1.16 to 1.66) per day; at 1991 prices (Rs1, or US$.03, per kilogram), they yielded three times as much. Fuelwood cutting and carrying could be done in three or four hours in the morning, leaving time for other work. In contrast to agricultural wage labor, which is available only during certain times of the year, fuelwood cutting was likely to generate two or three times more wages per unit of time spent. For the Chandana and Harinakuri communities to discontinue this lucrative economic activity was a considerable sacrifice. Based on discussions with villagers in Harinakuri, their decision appears to have been made partly on the basis of their concern over the deteriorating environment. They also recognized that their former level of forest exploitation was not sustainable, and that they would have had to shift occupations, in any case, once the forest resources were exhausted. The shift away from fuelwood cutting, and the loss of income it entailed, was softened by the land-reform program of the West Bengal Communist Party government. The program transferred title in rain-fed rice land from the landlords to

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Jyoti and his neighbors, who had acted as tenant farmers in the past. Because they no longer had to share their harvests with the landlord, the villagers’ incomes rose. At the same time, Jyoti and his neighbors decided to begin producing puffed rice (chira) for the local market. The work involves buying small stocks of unhusked grain (dhan), usually 20 kg at a time. The rice is husked, winnowed, and roasted under a brushwood and leaf fire. The operation requires three men, who work from 4 A.M. until 5 P.M. During one shift, usually they process 20 kg of raw rice, worth Rs60 (US$2), into 10 kg of chira worth Rs240 (US$8). This means hourly income per man from chira making is approximately Rs4.60 (US$.15) per hour, or Rs60 (US$2) per thirteen-hour day. This is approximately three times the official minimum daily wage (Rs24.85, or US$.83) for agricultural laborers. It also closely approximates the income that might be generated by fuelwood headloaders if they had sufficient forest resources to exploit. While Jyoti and his neighbors have been successful in finding an alternative source of income at least as lucrative as fuelwood cutting, many of their neighbors have not been so fortunate. They must suffer the lost income or continue to exploit the forest in defiance of their neighbors. The amount of time the Chandana and Harinakuri forest protection committees spend patrolling the forest and the value of that time in terms of opportunity costs are difficult to calculate. Many of these activities take place during periods of high threat. These fall during the months of August through October, after rice transplanting has been completed, and from February to May, after the rice harvest, when little agricultural work or paid labor opportunities are available. No regimented, full-time patrolling system has been utilized. Instead, villagers, especially women and children engaged in grazing, fuelwood collection, and other forest-related activities, act as an early-warning system. When given news of illegal activities, men then move into the forest for protection activities. While the time involved may not be great, many community members appeared to be available and alert to possible threats, which they perceived as significant. Sal poles probably represent the single most valuable product in the regenerating forest. The villagers also use the small leaves of date palms to weave mats for sale. Many women in the community were involved in sal leaf plate making; their product is sold for packaging foods. Other forest products include tubers, considered to be one of the most important products collected by community members. Although their value in local markets is low, they are an important source of starch and nutrients during food shortages. (Tuber preparation, however, is time- and fuel-consuming.) Mushrooms also provide a seasonal source of food and cash income. Of particular importance are kurkuri, mudal, and parab mushrooms. They bring Rs8 to 16 (US$.26 to $.53) per kg. When the mushrooms appear, during the rainy season from July to midOctober, households may collect up to 30 kg per day. Finally, grass and leaf fodder from the forest are important, especially from July to October, with forest leaf fodder (sal and others) of importance during the April-May dry season. By deter-

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mining the number of kilograms of forest fodder consumed per household and placing an equivalent fodder value on it, it would be possible to estimate the cash saved through the use of forest fodder.

Ecological Impact of Community Forest Protection The degraded sal forests of Southwest Bengal are known for their impressive regenerative vigor. In Chandana, for instance, after seven to eight years of protection, the trees had reached 6 to 8 m in height, and the forest canopy was nearly closed, creating a shaded, moist microenvironment. Accumulating leaf litter on the forest floor and expanding root systems appear to slow runoff during monsoon rains. Sun-loving species such as kendu (Diospyros melanoxylon) are being replaced by shade-tolerant herbs and fungi. With regeneration, villagers have reported the reappearance of a number of bird and plant species. In villages near Chandana, after five years of protection, more than 214 species of flora and fauna were present in the forest. Of these, 189 were utilized by local people. Edible food plant species numbered 39, including 6 types of tubers and 11 species of mushrooms. Some 47 plants are used as medicinals. In addition, 79 species of birds, animals, and insects are consumed. Generally, the larger regenerating forest patches exhibit greater diversity. Tribal communities tend to possess greater ethnobotanical knowledge and practice more extensive species utilization than caste groups. Basal areas, reflecting the volume of standing timber, also increased from zero in unprotected sal forests to 71 m3 after five years of protection and reached 164 m3 after ten years.

Forest Protection Committee Expectations Comanagement systems of the type emerging in Southwest Bengal are essentially partnership agreements between state forest departments and participating communities. To the extent that partnerships succeed, each party needs to share similar expectations regarding their roles and rights. The experience of Harinakuri village is typical of the kind of give and take necessary for successful comanagement. In Harinakuri, the forest protection committee leaders indicated a desire to fell sal for pole harvest as soon as possible. The villagers indicated that they had protected their sal for ten to twelve years, and that it should have reached the end of the rotation. On walking through the area, the forest department staff saw that the sal was only of seven to eight years’ growth and had not reached the 3-inch diameter at breast height (DBH) required to yield a good price as construction poles. The villagers’ eagerness to harvest the poles appeared to be driven by concern over the continuing pressures exerted by the outside cutting groups. The villagers were worried that as the poles gained value, the threat of a mass looting by a group of outside villagers would grow.

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The Harinakuri Forest Protection Committee leaders felt that a gradual harvest of the sal forest would be preferable, allowing for a 10 percent cut of the standing stock on an annual basis. The forest department had been considering such a system to provide a steady flow of yearly income to participating forest protection committees. Although the villagers thought that this would be a better system than a single felling every ten years, they feared that commercial felling would stimulate outside villagers to exploit their forest. They thought that this one time, as a demonstration to other communities of the financial benefits of protection, it might be better to cut the entire stand. Through this approach, other villagers finally might be induced to begin protection. All the surrounding communities would then start at the same point, with new coppice growth. At present, however, no decision has been made to go ahead with the pole harvest. Due to rapidly declining market prices for poles, the villagers may decide to preserve the forest and only selectively fell trees for local use in housing and as tools. The committee leaders had little information about forest department policies on sal pole harvesting and revenue-sharing procedures. Members of both the Chandana and Harinakuri forest protection committees noted that they hoped to obtain 40 percent of the gross proceeds rather than the 25 percent authorized under forest department policies. They were also unaware that their share would be calculated from the net proceeds rather than the gross. In Arabari, one of the only forest protection committee areas where harvesting and revenue distribution had taken place, the forest department overhead costs ran to 53 percent of the gross. This meant that, under the 25 percent policy, the Arabari Forest Protection Committee was entitled to only a little less than 12 percent of the gross. At the same rate, the 75 ha of forest land protected by the Harinakuri Forest Protection Committee would yield only Rs4,550 (US$151) per household during the ten-year rotation, or Rs455 (US$15) per year per family— far less than the Rs5,000 to 10,000 (US$167 to $333) a family might earn from a year of fuelwood headloading. Senior officers of the forest department later noted that the costs from Arabari were quite high, and they planned to reduce the overhead charges substantially when calculating the share going to forest protection committees like those of Harinakuri and Chandana. The Harinakuri Forest Protection Committee did not have access to information regarding the income it might receive from management activities. At the same time, they were committed to working with the forest department on the basis of good faith. They were anxious to participate in the felling themselves. The forest department staff indicated that local forest protection committee members would be hired at the official state minimum wage of Rs24.85 (US$.83) per day. The villagers thought the wage rate was fair and agreed to undertake the work on that basis. Consequently, forest protection committee members derived additional benefits from labor opportunities generated through the felling operation. The forest department staff told the villagers that officers from the forest protection committees would be involved in supervising the counting of poles taken from the

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forest. The forest protection committee members felt such an arrangement also would be useful, since they lacked experience in commercial felling. The forest protection committee wanted to maintain the revenues as a community fund rather than distribute them equally among the participating families. They had clearly spent some time considering how to utilize the funds and requested that the forest department assist them in establishing a community account with the local branch of the Punjab National Bank. The account was to be overseen by the eight-member Harinakuri Forest Protection Committee’s managing committee and its secretary. The committee planned to use the funds to construct a community rice-storage barn, which could also be used by families involved in chira making to allow them to buy grain at harvest time at lower cost. They also wanted to establish a cooperative store to sell groceries, stationery, and school supplies, since they currently had to travel some distance to the local markets to buy these goods. Finally, the forest protection committee wanted to form a savings and loan program to allow community members access to low-interest loans for medical needs, marriages, and agricultural inputs. Establishing a bank account and gaining tax exemptions on revenues generated from timber sales may require the formal registration of the forest protection committee under the Indian Societies Act. This also may require assistance from the forest department. For future rotations, the forest protection committee would like to shift to an annual felling system. They note that the regeneration of the forest has had substantial environmental and economic benefits that will be lost temporarily if the entire area is clear-felled. The most important advantages emerging from forest regeneration have been improved groundwater infiltration and slowed runoff and the increased availability of such nontimber forest products as tubers, mushrooms, and fiber materials. The reestablishment of standing forest near Harinakuri village also has enabled a large population of birds to nest in the area. The birds are important in controlling insect pests that attack the rice crop. The forest protection committee also feels the forest has had a beneficial effect in cleansing the air of disease. When the forest was degraded, its members note, the incidence of disease had increased. They associate a healthy environment with a good standing forest.

Community Forest Management in Orissa In the state of Orissa a grass-roots community forest protection movement has been growing for several decades. Two case studies from Orissa indicate the types of community-based management systems that are emerging. The case of Mahapada village reflects the process through which a forestdependent, low-status tribal group demonstrated the ways communities can organize to protect degraded forests. The management systems the villagers developed

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later were adopted by the higher-caste groups in the village. The second case, Budikhamari, tracks a single village’s forest-protection group’s expansion into a coalition of seventy-nine neighboring communities. This larger group formed an apex organization to coordinate forest-protection activities, conduct environmental education programs, and provide mutual assistance in dealing with the forest department. In recent years, the Orissa Forest Department has taken a greater interest in village forest-protection groups. Resolutions passed in 1988 (GOO 1988) and 1990 recognized the villagers’ right to a share of forest products and clarified their management responsibilities. (A resolution is a unique Indian legal form, a technical term that describes a process through which the intent or emphasis of broad legislative authority can be refined or clarified. Resolutions are often in the form of a government order promulgated by a technical agency such as the forest department.) Some foresters have been very effective in encouraging communities to organize. They have enhanced the groups’ authority by formally registering them and providing local patrol groups with identity cards. Yet recent meetings with village forest protection group leaders indicate that few see any advantage in interacting with forest department staff or local government officials.

The Case of Mahapada Village Sarangi Range is located in Dhenkanal Division, approximately 40 km to the northeast of Dhenkanal town. The range has extensive tracts of degraded forest land as well as large forest areas, including the 12,960-ha Kapilas Reserve Forest, which provides a habitat for up to sixty wild elephants. In 1987, a shortage of trees of harvestable girth led to a moratorium on further felling. Still, the range officer and his staff have serious problems with organized, illegal felling, especially in the eastern side of the territory. Fortunately, the emergence of community forest protection groups throughout the range has established effective access controls over an estimated 30 percent of the forest lands in the range. In an attempt to strengthen these informal groups, I. Z. Khan, the range officer, has registered sixty-one local village forest protection committees. He notes that thirty of these community groups were active before the forest department began its program to encourage group formation in 1988, and more villages are forming groups as they observe the successful forest regeneration efforts of their neighbors. PIPAR, a local training and research NGO involved in assisting forest management groups, indicates that a number of groups may be operating without having been contacted by the forest department. PIPAR estimates that one corner of the range has sixty-five active forest protection committees and that an additional eighty-five villages are interested in forming management organizations. In summary, Sarangi Range may comprise up to one hundred active communitymanagement groups, with the potential for up to two hundred or more forest protection committees to operate (see Map 3.3).

Map 3.3 B r aman i

R i ver

R.F.

Aswakhola Reserve Forest

Sadangi (R.O.)

(6,350 acres)

Mahapada Village

Nilaprasad Jaranda

Rupabalia Reserve Forest

Nischinta Reserve Forest

Baniapada

(2,260 acres)

Khankera Reserve Forest Jungkira

Deagoan

Kaimati

Kapilas Reserve Forest (32,000 acres)

To Dhenkanal

Sarangi Range and Forest Protection Committees

KEY

Range Boundary Forest Boundary Roads Forest Protection Committee Village/Town

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Forest Protection Committee Experiences Mahapada Village is located at the northern side of Rupabalia Reserve Forest, a tract of more than 900 ha. The community was settled by Saura tribals approximately three generations ago. The Saura cleared the forest and developed rain-fed rice fields at the base of the hill. Brahman families who moved into the area gradually acquired all the farmland in the village and brought scheduled- and cultivator-caste families with them. The forest was well managed by the community to meet subsistence needs until about sixteen years ago, when the Brahmans sold clear-felling rights to outsiders, probably from Dhenkanal. With the once-rich forest quickly being reduced to scrub, the Saura tribals went to the Brahmans and demanded to manage their share. The Saura began protecting a 25-ha tract fourteen years ago, and rapid mixedforest regeneration resulted, encouraging three other groups to form committees two years later. These forests are now more than 10 m in height and support a diverse range of tree, shrub, climber, and herb species, generating significant flows of valuable nontimber forest products. Wildlife, too, has begun to reappear, witnessed by the recent sighting of a bear emerging from the forest. Two years ago, the Brahmans also began protecting their 40-ha section of the forest. The five forest protection committees now operating in Mahapada are shown in Figure 3.1, and their territories are delineated in Map 3.4. The Saura tribal community bases its survival for at least six months of the year on forest tubers (tumbualu, kanta alu, and panial), mushrooms, edible leaves, and other forest foods. For an additional two months of the year, their subsistence is dependent on the collection of kendu (Diospyros melanoxylon) leaves, used for making bidi (cheroots), in the forest. They receive Rs10 (US$.33) for two thousand leaves of high quality. The Mahapada forest protection committees meet monthly to make forest-management decisions. The committees determine when community members can collect fuelwood (generally five to six times per month), how often each household head is responsible for forest patrolling duties (usually twice a month), and fines for community members who break management rules. Special meetings are held to discuss major timber or pole requirements for roof or house construction. Women generally do not get invited to sahi meetings, which are held in a men-only community center. The forest protection committees are basically a component of the clan or tribal council (sahi samiti), which also handles village disputes, festival organizing, road repairs, and school activities. Some time ago, the forest protection committees of Mahapada village asked the Orissa Forest Department beat officer to supervise the digging of trenches to demarcate the boundaries between each committee’s managed forest patch. Their request indicates that, at least in this area, communities perceive a need for forest department recognition of their boundaries and rights and wanted the beat officer to be knowledgeable regarding their territorial responsibilities. Similar needs for demarcation and recognition likely will be found elsewhere. Special training for

Figure 3.1

FPC3 FPC5 Saura Sahi Brahman Sahi

(75 H.H.)

(40 H.H.)

Chausa Sahi (25 H.H.)

FPC2 Gauda (20 H.H.)

Keuta (3 H.H.)

FPC4 Bejibolua Chausa Sahi

(22 H.H.)

FPC1 Pana Sahi

(40 H.H.)

Venn diagram of forest protection groups in Mahapada Village by social composition.

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Map 3.4

400 m

FPC1 Pana Caste

FPC2 Chausa/Guada Castes

FPC3 Saura Tribe

(30 ha)

(40 ha)

(25 ha)

12 years protection

12 years protection

14 years protection

FPC4 Bejibolua Chausa Caste (30 ha)

10 years protection PRIVATE AGRICULTURAL LAND

300 m

FPC5 Brahman Caste (40 ha)

2 years protection

Saura Sahi (40 ha)

To Jaranda Brahman Sahi (75 ha)

Guada/Chausa Sahi (48 ha)

200 m 2 kilometers

Mahapada Forest Protection Committee (FPC) Territories

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Bejibolua Chausa Sahi (22 ha)

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forest department field staff in these procedures might be useful, after operational guidelines have been developed.

Budhikhamari Joint Protection Party Budhikhamari is at the center of a forest protection movement that has evolved in northern Orissa during the last ten years. Until the 1960s, villagers report, good standing forests existed. These produced a wide range of products used for home consumption and commercial activities. A prolonged drought in the late 1960s led to more rapid exploitation of forest resources, as destitute villagers turned to fuelwood headloading and worked for town-based timber smugglers. By the late 1970s, most of the surrounding forest had been reduced to scrub. The disappearance of the forest meant that local households had great difficulty obtaining the many forest products they needed to meet a wide range of recurring needs, including materials for housing, tools, medicines, food supplements, fodder, and fuelwood. By 1993, seventy-nine villages had established a network of forestprotection groups guarding 3,247 ha of once degraded moist deciduous forest. The actual process through which communities began to organize is not clear. As early as 1983, some community members, in response to forest product scarcities, began discussing strategies to control access and regenerate small patches of forest neighboring Budhikhamari village. The community adopted the thengapali (bamboo-stick rotation) system, in which each household must allocate a young male member for patrol duties when its turn arises. Patrols are usually done in groups of four to five people. In Budhikhamari, if someone fails to patrol, he is fined Rs5 (US$.17). When patrols encounter outsiders carrying out illegal headloading or timber harvesting, they are fined. Both local people involved in illicit timber and fuelwood extraction and some forest officers initially questioned the villagers’ efforts. By 1986, however, S. C. Mohanty, the divisional forest officer, and K. C. Mishra, the local range officer, became aware of the concern and initiatives of the community. They began a series of support activities. The Orissa Forest Department staff worked with Gorachand Mohanta, a local community leader, to initiate a series of meetings with other villages in the area. The local forest department staff began assisting villagers in demarcating forest tracts to be placed under the protection of each participating community. By January 1987, sixty people from eight neighboring villages had reached an agreement to conserve plots of forest with the approval of the forest department. Within two months, seven other local communities also began guarding degraded forests surrounding their villages; by 1988, twenty-five villages in the area had formed forest protection committees. Representatives from participating villages formed an apex body known as the Budhikhamari Joint Protection Party to facilitate communication among participating communities. The party is an important example of nongovernmental,

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intervillage forums for forest-management coordination. Since its formation, the party has conducted numerous public meetings, environmental marches, and nature camps for schoolchildren and local community members. The party also has provided a unified front through which the seventy-nine participating villages can deal with the forest department, as well as with more powerful timber smugglers and fuelwood middlemen. Representatives from the Budikhamari Joint Protection Party are reluctant to establish any formal ties with the local panchayat (formal village government system), and they reject the idea that panchayat headmen (sarpanch) should become chairmen of forest protection committees, as required by the Orissa state government. While the party remains skeptical of government officials, community leaders feel that the local forest department staff has been supportive of their attempts to stabilize forest use. The Budhikhamari Joint Protection Party has gained greater legitimacy among its membership and with outsiders through its dealings with foresters. Since the Orissa Forest Department passed resolutions to formalize community protection groups in 1988 (GOO 1988) and 1990, it has begun issuing identification cards to villagers involved in forest patrolling. The forest department staff from neighboring Simlipal National Park hopes that the party movement might extend its activities to that area in the future. As the forests surrounding Simlipal have experienced greater protection from local communities, extractive pressures inside the park from fuelwood headloaders as well as organized logging gangs have increased. Whether communities and the forest department can develop a comprehensive management plan for production forests and the national park remains to be seen.

Policy and Institutional Challenges in Comanagement The emergence of tribal and scheduled-caste leaders who are able to organize forest protection is a testimony to the broad sociopolitical changes that have occurred in Orissa and West Bengal during the last twenty years. Community members clearly are concerned about environmental degradation in their areas and are willing and able to take action to respond to the challenge. In some cases, they are increasingly encouraged by supportive forest department programs and helpful field staff.

Community Initiatives The cases of Chandana, Mahapada, and Budikhamari indicate that communities often are mobilized by local leaders who draw attention to the villages’ deterio-

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rating forest resources and related environmental problems. These case studies provide useful glimpses into the context and process of emerging forest protection committees. They highlight communities’ ability to organize and take control of their natural resources. The villages’ experiences also indicate the vast potential of sal forest ecosystems to renew themselves, provided human disturbance patterns are halted. At the same time, the case studies indicate that many institutional, economic, and ecological problems continue to threaten the sustainability of these new community-based resource management systems. In Chandana, despite success in protecting at least 100 of the 160 ha of disturbed natural sal forest neighboring their village, the community continues to be confronted by threats from other villages in the area whose residents depend on fuelwood cutting for a substantial portion of their income. The tribal and scheduled-caste people who illegally exploit these forests are driven by economic necessity and encouraged by local and urban higher-income and -caste groups. Until all communities neighboring the forest can be effectively brought into the comanagement program and their economic needs met, these emerging local-management systems will remain threatened and their sustainability questionable.

The Role of National Policy In West Bengal, many management issues still need attention as communities and the forest department attempt to develop sustainable partnerships. As the sal pole harvest approaches, the forest protection committees and the forest department will face a new set of issues. The forest department needs to clarify procedures for harvesting and communicate them to participating forest protection committees well in advance. Profit-sharing terms also need further consideration. Ideally, the forest protection committee share should be based on an economic assessment of the opportunity costs each community incurs through protection activities and the income lost when the community ceases other forestexploitation activities. A floating rate based on the ratio of protected forest area to households also may be necessary. In Harinakuri, where the ratio is more than 2 ha per household, the returns from protection will be relatively attractive. By contrast, in forest protection committees with only 0.5 ha or less per household, forest conservation income may be insufficient to provide an adequate incentive to stimulate effective management actions. The forest department also needs to reassess the management costs that are deducted from gross profits. It may be possible to set a clear percentage figure as a maximum, therefore ensuring the forest protection committee share would not be subject to major reductions due to management costs. More generally, forest departments need to relax felling requirements and revise working plans in areas where communities primarily are managing for conservation.

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Forest departments should respect situations in which villagers prefer not to carry out any commercial timber cutting but rather leave the forest for nontimber forest products and its hydrological and microclimatic functions. Newly drafted national and state resolutions support the establishment of forest comanagement systems in India and provide an attractive opportunity for experimentation with community–forest department collaboration (GOI 1988; MEF 1990). These guidelines will need revision based on experience with forest comanagement activities. Changes are likely to be in the direction of providing communities with adequate managerial authority, tenurial security, and appropriate economic incentives. Research on the process of community forest management group formation indicates the existence of a great deal of grassroots organizing for environmental management in various parts of India (see Dhar, Gupta, and Sarin 1990; Gadgil 1991; Malhotra 1991a; Pandey 1991; Poffenberger 1990, 1992; Poffenberger, McGean, and Bhatia 1990; Poffenberger and Singh 1992; Roy 1991; Shashi, Singh, and Singh 1991). In response to deteriorating forest conditions, thousands of communities from south Bihar, eastern Gujarat, Orissa, eastern Maharashtra, southwest Bengal, and other parts of the country have attempted to restrict exploitation and halt the process of environmental degradation. A number of state forest departments have supported these local activities for some years. Where state forest departments are supportive, village forest management groups often are able to sustain protection effectively, even under pressure from other communities and the private sector. With the support of state forest comanagement resolutions, these groups can receive formal legitimacy, further strengthening their authority. One policy question concerns the form this recognition should take and the legal nature of these local management organizations. Forest Protection Committee Relationships with Local and National Governments There is some concern that the emerging forest management organizations may not fit well within the system of local government (panchayati raj) or may be in conflict with the customary rights of the larger local-user population. Experience concerning the possible relationships between community forest-management organizations and local government is limited. Most resolutions give local panchayat institutions an oversight role in monitoring the activities of village groups, as is the case in West Bengal. If a forest tract and managing communities are spread over a large area covering several panchayats (gram sabha), coordination may be more difficult. One option for dealing with the extralegal nature of community forestmanagement groups and their relations with local government bodies, as the Orissa joint-management resolution has suggested, is to extend membership in forest-management groups to all members of the panchayat. In some areas, however, this would create other problems. Since many joint forest management

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groups are comprised of members from a single small hamlet, incorporating all communities within the panchayat would expand membership significantly. The community that originally formed a joint forest management group would have to join other villages in creating a new management system. In the process, the original community’s authority over forest management decisions would be eroded. Finally, where existing community management groups are functioning, they would be obligated to share forest produce with other communities that have been incorporated into the management committee. The West Bengal Forest Department has attempted to form multivillage forest protection committees, in some cases joining together smaller community forest protection committees. Here, the component communities generally agree to keep their independent identities within the larger group, maintain clear boundaries for their areas, and retain exclusive control over harvests in their territories. At the same time, the larger group does seem to play a helpful role in facilitating joint protection activities and resolving disputes. According to the West Bengal resolution (GOWB 1989, 1990), these larger groups can be linked to the village panchayat. Another concern is that if forest comanagement groups were absorbed by the village panchayat, vested interests influential in many communities might exert control over decision making. More democratically elected village panchayats are developing in Karnataka and West Bengal, where the new panchayati raj system has been adopted. These also exist in many communities in other parts of India. In many states, though, traditional elites still effectively manipulate village panchayat decision making. Since many small, community-based forest protection groups are comprised of less powerful groups and communities within the larger panchayat, they might lose authority to elites if the management groups became a direct adjunct of the panchayat. In addition, twenty years’ experience of Indian social forestry programs suggests that panchayats may not even be able to effectively manage community woodlots. In some cases, this incapacity was due to the panchayats’ inherent political nature and the often diverse constituencies that make reaching consensus about the management of community forest resources difficult. Recent experiences in both India and Nepal demonstrate that smaller community groups (often comprised of ten to fifty households) can more effectively mobilize to establish management systems, including protection activities, harvesting and sharing systems, and dispute arbitration. This results from the smaller groups’ economic and social homogeneity and their physical proximity to the forest. While there is a need to clarify the relationships between local forest management groups and local government institutions, simply subsuming these groups in the local government body could threaten their effectiveness. Exploration of the role local governments could play in collaborating with forest departments to assist with planning and monitoring the forest management activities of local groups within their jurisdiction may be a more useful approach. A formal institution, such as the local government body, could play a role in dispute

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arbitration among communities and, when the need arose, between communities and the forest department. All state resolutions should deal more clearly with arbitration among communities and should discuss the handling of disputes between the communities and the forest department. While the resolutions that have been promulgated are generally vague when addressing relationships between community management groups and the local government organization, the West Bengal resolution may have been overly specific in terms of the role of the forest department and local government in determining committee members. The original 1989 resolution stated, “The beneficiaries shall be identified from amongst the economically backward people living in the vicinity of forests concerned,” and that the local panchayat land management committee “shall select beneficiaries for construction of the forest protection committee.” This statement indicated that local government representatives from outside the community would determine who could and could not participate. In 1990, the West Bengal resolution was revised to allow every family in the village to be a member of the management group. However, the new resolution maintained the clause that the panchayat land-management committee and the forest department should determine families eligible to benefit from the program. If membership is selective and determined by outside agencies and local government bodies, there is a possibility that some families already participating in forest comanagement activities might be denied membership and would be excluded from the program. Having final authority over their own membership seems fundamental for community-based organizations. Studies in West Bengal (Malhotra 1991b; Roy 1991) indicate that many villages organize their own forest protection committees and determine their own membership. Forest protection committees comprised of all or most households in the community had more effective forest-management organizations than those with partial membership. In areas where local groups function effectively, the forest department and local government may only need to formally empower them and provide technical assistance. This, generally, is what is occurring in West Bengal. Since the West Bengal resolution and those from a number of other states imply that the forest department and local government direct the formation of community forest management organizations, the policy does not entirely fit the realities of the rural context in which the program is being implemented. Forest departments and policy makers need better information about how and why communities organize to manage forest resources, and about how they might best relate to local government bodies. Recent resolutions also could stimulate the proliferation of numerous new community-level organizations that are completely dependent on the forest department, rather than local initiative, for their existence. This could undermine the possibility of greater self-governance at the lower level or the development of more democratically elected or selected institutions or processes. Community forest management groups, as the little brothers in the partnership with the forest de-

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partment, then would have little say over policy and management decisions. Most state resolutions possess clauses that allow the forest department to dissolve forest management organizations if they fail to perform according to the expectations of the department. While forest departments will require some statement in the resolution to enable dissolution of the management agreement if their community partners fail to uphold their responsibilities under the joint forest management program, it is also important that the identity of village resource management organizations be respected. In Rajasthan and Haryana, where the resolutions (GOH 1990; GOJK 1992; GOM 1992; GOMP 1992; GOR 1991) require communities with active forest-management groups to become registered societies, protection committees have a separate legal identity and, consequently, greater independence. Some committees in Haryana and West Bengal have requested assistance from members of the legislative assembly and other politically elected leaders to strengthen their bargaining power. In the Pinjore area north of Chandigarh, fourteen community management groups met together to request that the Haryana Forest Department modify the terms of the grass-lease pricing and payment system. These experiences suggest that community forest management groups will want to maintain a separate identity and utilize local governance bodies, elected leaders, and group apex organizations as mechanisms to express their needs and negotiate more effectively with forest department partners. The need for autonomy and democratic process at the community level is currently lacking in state resolutions, but these should be part of any revisions. Satisfactory agreements between forest departments and community management groups also might be facilitated by representatives from both groups developing a joint plan for the area. Although some resolutions mandate community input into microplans, current forest department working plans do not incorporate this community input. The result, especially if there are different viewpoints, is an unresolved tension between the community and the forest department plan. Mechanisms need to be developed to ensure that forest department and management-group plans for areas under comanagement are compatible with and satisfactory to both parties. Policy and Women’s Participation Most resolutions do not adequately address the role of women in forest comanagement systems. While the Gujarat resolution (GOG 1991) specifically requires at least two women members on community management committees, and revised guidelines for the joint forest management program in Haryana require both male and female household heads to be members of the community forest management society, most resolutions do not refer to women’s participation. Since women are frequently the primary users of forest resources, this is a serious omission. For women to play a central role in management decision making and be formally recognized as voting members of local management groups is both logical and important. In some rural contexts, men migrate from the village for extended

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periods or are too busy with agricultural work to allocate time to management activities. In these cases, the establishment of community management groups solely comprised of women may be appropriate. This has taken place already in a number of states. Resolutions need flexibility to successfully support emerging community initiatives. They should not assume a single model of community management. Conflicting Ownership and Use Rights Perhaps more problematic is the question of preexisting user rights. In many forest areas in India, communities and panchayats already possess a range of customary legal rights over forest resources (nistar, dafavati, etc.) granted under the earlier forest acts of 1878 and 1927. Emerging forest department comanagement programs are entering into new agreements with communities and extending a new set of rights targeted to local groups. This process can create problems if earlier rights-holders are excluded from the new agreements. Existing rights need to be reviewed before new management agreements and rights, previously granted as appropriate under the earlier forest act, are formalized. Some forest protection committees operating in Southwest Bengal negotiated with neighboring communities to clarify rights and territorial responsibilities when they began to initiate protection activities. In many cases, communities have the strongest incentive to avoid conflicts with their neighbors over forest rights. These villages have demonstrated that they can conduct much of the negotiation on their own or with the assistance of the local government. The forest department, however, holds ultimate responsibility for seeing that its agreements with management groups do not create conflicts over real or perceived preexisting use rights. Once an intervillage consensus about forest management rights has been reached, agreements need some type of formal legal approval. Some government agencies also are empowered with certain rights and interests. Panchayats and parastatal organizations, as well as local cooperatives, often have harvesting and marketing rights to timber and nontimber products. These rights must be recognized or settled when the forest department is developing agreements with community management groups. With the exception of clauses in the national (GOI 1988; MEF 1990) and West Bengal (GOWB 1989, 1991) resolutions, most state program guidelines do not address the long-term rights of participating communities who protect and hope to benefit from forest lands under comanagement. Clear tenure security enhances community-management groups’ authority to carry out protection activities, especially when they are under pressure from neighboring villages and private interest groups. Participating communities that invest labor in protection activities and defer exploitation of forest resources to benefit from future production may need greater assurance of the government’s commitment to their participation in the program. Since state forest departments are creating management partnerships with vil-

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lage groups, the timeframe for such agreements, as well as the basis for extensions, necessarily must be clear. It may be appropriate for the time period of the agreement to correspond to the production cycle (rotation) of the primary products. In West Bengal, this is the ten- to twelve-year rotation of the sal poles. Without a clear temporal mandate, community management groups may fear that their labor investments will not yield benefits, since the forest department could revoke the agreement prior to the harvest. Aside from providing tenure security through specific clauses in state forest comanagement resolutions, management groups should be aware of their tenurial rights and formalize them through countersigned agreements, certificates of usufruct rights, and symbols of authority. When outsiders question the authority of community-management groups, or when a group must challenge offenders, such documents are important in demonstrating the group’s legitimacy. Ecological Limitations of Policy The level of biological productivity is another important consideration in setting policies regarding produce sharing. For example, in semiarid western India, tree growth and biomass production will be slower than in high-rainfall areas. Some disturbed forest land in Southwest Bengal still possesses healthy sal stumps and other root systems that regenerate secondary forest growth through coppicing very rapidly. Within a few years of harvesting, a community may possess a substantial secondary forest that generates multiple products. In other forest areas, where stumps have been removed for fuelwood and soil erosion has been extensive, flows of forest products will be considerably lessened and slower to materialize. If community management costs are to be met in such contexts, the forest department will need to invest in more capital-intensive enrichment planting and possibly provide additional employment opportunities. Currently, forest comanagement policy documents do not address the need for flexibility in ensuring an equitable flow of benefits to participating community-management groups operating in different ecological contexts.

Conclusion Resolutions alone may have little or no effect on reality. They need to be effectively communicated to the forest department staff and village families and translated into local languages. Meetings will need to be organized with forestry staff and participating communities to explain the content and discuss the implications of resolutions. New ideas will emerge through diagnostic research, program monitoring, and open discussion with participating groups; these should result in improvements to the programs. To the extent that policies and program activities can respond in a supportive manner to the problem-solving strategies being developed by communities and foresters, forest comanagement offers a promising

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opportunity to respond to India’s forest management problems in a socially and ecologically sound manner. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to thank the communities and all NSG colleagues who contributed to the collection and analysis of these field reports. Particular thanks are due to the West Bengal and Orissa forest departments, S. B. Roy, Mitalee Chatterjee, Kailash Malhotra, Arvind Khare, Madhav Gadgil, N. H. Ravindranath, Jeff Campbell, S. Palit, Neera and Kundan Singh, Samar Singh, Syed Rizvi, Shekhar Singh, K. R. Raghutnathan, and Betsy McGean. SOURCES Dhar, S.K., J. R. Gupta, and M. Sarin. 1990. Participatory Forest Management in the Shivalik Hills: Experiences of the Haryana Forest Department. Working Paper No. 4, Sustainable Forest Management Series. New Delhi: Ford Foundation. Gadgil, M. 1991. Natural Regeneration through Community Participation in Degraded Forest Lands in the Western Ghats. Bangalore, India: Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science. Government of Bihar (GOB). 1990. Resolution No. 5244. August 11. Government of Gujarat (GOG). 1991. Resolution No. FCA-1090-125V (3). March 13. Government of Haryana (GOH). 1990. Resolution No. 1370 FL-1-90/15610. June 13. Government of India (GOI). 1988. National Forest Policy. December. Government of Jammu and Kashmir (GOJK). 1992. Resolution No. SRO-61. March 19. Government of Madha Pradesh (GOMP). 1991. Order No. 16/4/10/2/91. October 12. Government of Maharashtra (GOM). 1992. Resolution No. SLF-1091/P/K/119191/F/11. March 16. Government of Orissa (GOO). 1988. Resolution No. 10 F (Pron) 47/88/17240/ FFAH. August 1. Government of Rajasthan (GOR). 1991. Circular No. F-7 (39)/FOREST/90. March 16. Government of West Bengal (GOWB). 1989. Resolution No. 4461-For/D/15-16/88. July 12. ———. 1990. Modification Resolution No. 5062-For D/15-16/88. July 27. Malhotra, K. C. 1991a. “People, Biodiversity and Regenerating Tropical Sal Forest in West Bengal, India.” Paper presented to the International Symposium on Food and Nutrition in the Tropical Forests, September, Paris, France. ———. 1991b. Joint Forest Management in West Bengal: A Study in Non-Timber Forest Produce and FPC Structure in Jamboni Range, Midnapore District. Calcutta: Indian Institute of Biosocial Research and Development.

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Ministry of Environment and Forest (MEF), Government of India. 1990. Resolution Regarding Involvement of Village Communities and Voluntary Agencies for Regeneration of Degraded Forest Lands. No. 6-21/89 F. P. June 1. Pandey, D. 1991. “Joint Forest Management in Rajasthan.” Yojana (Oct. 15). Poffenberger, M. 1990. Joint Management for Forest Lands: Experiences from South Asia. Working Paper No. 2, Sustainable Forest Management Series. New Delhi: Ford Foundation. ———. 1992. “The Resurgence of Community Forest Management in the Jungel Mahals of West Bengal.” Paper presented at the Conference on South Asia’s Changing Environment, March 16–20, Bellagio, Italy. ———, B. McGean, and K. Bhatia, eds. 1990. Forest Management Partnership: Regenerating India’s Forests. Executive Summary of the Workshop on Sustainable Forestry, September 10–12, New Delhi. Working Paper No. 3, Sustainable Forest Management Series. New Delhi: Ford Foundation. ———, and S. Singh. 1992. “Forest Management Partnership: Regenerating India’s Forests.” Unasylva (Food and Agriculture Organization, Rome) 43 (170). Roy, S. B. 1991. Forest Protection Committees in West Bengal, India: Emerging Policy Issues. Honolulu, Hawaii: East West Center. Shashi, K., N. Singh, and K. Singh. 1991. Community Forest Management in Orissa: Case Studies. Bhopal and New Delhi: Indian Institute of Forest Management/ Swedforest.

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Transforming Customary Law and Coastal Management Practices in the Maluku Islands, Indonesia, 1870–1992 Charles Zerner

Leave the pinang alone! Leave the coconuts alone! Leave the bananas alone! Leave the trochus there! From the mountains to the coast, Leave it all alone! Ritual chant, Saparua Island

In 1989, I sat in the office of the head of Nolloth village on Saparua Island, one of the Lease Islands of the Central Maluku of eastern Indonesia. There Mr. Metekohy, one of two chief kewangs of the village, chanted a portion of the announcement he recites each year to communicate that the period of prohibitions on entry, harvest, or hunting in community-controlled areas, known throughout the islands as sasi, is in effect. In his role as kewang, Metekohy combines the responsibilities of a resource monitor with the power to enforce community resource-management rules. While walking the paths on the periphery of the community-management territory, or petuanan, he announces the temporary closing of the area. “As I circumambulate the outermost limits of each community-management area,” Metekohy explained, “I stop wherever paths intersect to repeat my ritual chanting.” His chants are accompanied by the lowing, plaintive sounds of an assistant blowing on a conch shell trumpet. Among many agricultural and fishing communities throughout the Maluku Islands, sasi is an historic family of institutions and practices that has been used to regulate access to particular resources and territories under a variety of property regimes. Although a systematic study of sasi over a broad geographic range has never been undertaken, it is clear that these practices have been and, in many 80

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areas throughout the 1,029 or more Maluku Islands (see Map 4.1), continue to be followed. Time and space are among the most important media through which many Moluccan communities regulate access to resources and territories that are important from subsistence and commercial perspectives. When an area is ditutup (closed), entry prohibitions are in effect, and the area under sasi is marked by signs placed at strategic locations. Temporary signing of individual trees, groves, or entire territories is accomplished with striking ritual constructions of paired coconut palm fronds jutting outward from a central sugarcane trunk crowned by a young coconut; sound-producing “instruments” at the apex of the assemblage make percussive sounds when struck by the wind. This is one of the fundamental ways in which the boundaries of resource areas under sasi are marked. In the case of Nolloth, only the chief kewang and his assistants, a group of ten anak-anak kewang charged with enforcing the closure of the area and implementing the prohibitions within the community-management territory, are permitted to enter freely during the closed period; a host of other prohibitions on gear, behavior, and identity of entrants also is put into play. When sasi is opened, entry prohibitions and other associated restrictions are lifted; the kewang circumambulates the territory formerly under sasi, unties the sasi signs or bindings, and announces that the prohibitions governing the territory have been lifted. Although the practice of demarcating “cultural regions” is problematic because it suggests historically fixed and homogenous regions, it may be useful to consider the Maluku Islands as the westernmost edge of a cultural and institutional Wallace’s line. Beginning with the Maluku, and extending east through New Guinea and the islands of the Southwest Pacific, marine tenure institutions, rules, and practices have played an important role in regulating access to reefs and inshore marine waters. To the west of the Maluku, beginning with Indonesia’s orchidshaped island, Sulawesi (formerly Celebes), open-access, freedom-of-the-seas ideologies and practices are mixed with a variety of marine tenure practices that only now are beginning to be understood and documented (see Bailey and Zerner 1992; Zerner 1992, 1994a, 1994b).

The Development of Sasi Institutions and Practices Historically, and in many contemporary Moluccan communities as well, sasi practices are not just a body of changing rules but also a diverse set of institutional roles that have varying degrees of relationship to central governmental and religious authority. Sasi role holders, including kewangs and mauwengs as well as other practitioners, combine religious, civil, martial, and commercial functions. Attempts to characterize sasi ahistorically, as though these practices, rules, and institutional roles had a fixed essence, would be inadequate and inaccurate. Zerner (1994b) and von Benda-Beckmann, von Benda-Beckmann, and Brouwer

Map 4.1 Seram Strait

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Map 4.2 Seram Strait

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a

St rai

t

Porto

Siri Sori Serani Paperu Saparua Bay Booi

Saparua Island

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Siri Sori Islam Ulat

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(1992) speculate that sasi practices initially may have been directed toward ancestral spirits believed to inhabit Moluccan marine and terrestrial landscapes. Such spirits were said to control the luck of the hunt, the fertility of crops, and individual fate. Those who violated areas marked by sasi signs risked sickness or even death at the hands of these spirits, in addition to a variety of civil punishments and fines implemented by the kewang. During the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth, Zerner and von Benda-Beckmann, von Benda-Beckmann, and Brouwer suggest, sasi practices were recrafted and deployed by local elites, assisted by Dutch colonial administrators who sought access to sources of income realized by the control of the sale of valuable agricultural and, to lesser extent, marine commodities. Sixty-nine years before Mr. Metekohy chanted a few sasi verses for me, a villager recalled the anxious atmosphere surrounding ritual closure of the coconut groves around Siri Sori Serani village in 1920: In the village very ripe coconuts were in the trees, ready to be plucked. After consultation with the chief kewang, the village council decided to impose the sasi. . . . Following this, a sasi proclamation was made. One evening in the dark of the moon, the chief kewang, attended by his assistants, walked around the village. . . . [T]he kewang called out loudly . . . [and] the assistant kewang blared his great shells to produce a long and somber sound. The chief kewang chanted a long-lasting “silo . . . o . . . o!” [a word that means sasi]. Whereupon his assistant answered “mese . . . o . . . o! [is laid down]”. As they went around the village, I heard the sounds. I was but a child sitting in my house, and I began to tremble in my seat. (Volker 1925:298–299) As a young boy, fears of spirits, as well as fears of being apprehended by the kewangs on their nightly patrols, prevented the narrator from entering the grove of coconuts on which the sasi prohibition had been laid: From this evening the sasi was laid down and the work of the kewang began: they saw to the implementation of sasi. For no one can escape entrapment and punishment, if he plucked something out of a garden. Personally, it is enough to come up against a kewang on a dark evening, far away from the vicinity of your own house. In order to quell suspicion, men will reverse and criss-cross their paths to avoid the bush police; for if a man cannot give a clear and polished explanation for being out so late beyond his house, then he must bear the punishment anyway. (Volker 1925:299) The teller of this tale cringed at the prospect of violating the coconut grove sasi because he was terrified of the potential response of watchful spirits. These impalpable witnesses might inflict a catastrophe upon him or the community:

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I still remember this very well, that we boys in the time of sasi played in the groves, and an old dry coconut fell down [we would not pick it up]. [Normally] we wouldn’t think twice about grabbing it and whisking it away. This was because we felt a sort of holy awe, and we knew we would cause a great flood if we took the coconut. We had a secret terror of the ghosts. (Volker 1925:299)

Sasi and the Regulation of Access to Agricultural Commodities The effectiveness of sasi practices has waxed and waned throughout its recorded history, depending, in part, on the source(s) of authority and the political and economic interests these authorities and rules represented. Whether, and in what circumstances, local villagers were interested in or willing to submit to sasi regimes is not clear. Religious sanctions and practitioners, Dutch colonial authority, and local Moluccan elites dependent upon the colonial enterprise for legitimization of their power and income were among the varying sources of authority behind imposition of sasi in different times and places. Recently, as we shall see, Indonesian village-level government officials as well as environmental nongovernmental organizations have begun to restructure sasi rules, practices, and ideologies in attempts to reconstruct sasi in ways that further their own (very different) interests. In certain areas of the Maluku Islands, sasi developed as an instrument for facilitating commercial regulation of access to valuable agricultural crops, especially coconuts, betel and kemiri nuts, and possibly cloves. Indeed, the pivotal historical role of the Central and North Maluku Islands (including Ambon, Saparua, Seram, Banda, Buru, Haruku, Ai, Hatta, and Ran, as well as Halmahera, Ternate and Tidore) as supply centers for the world spice trade suggests the strong possibility that, in certain areas, these practices may have been stimulated by markets for agricultural commodities. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, traders from Makassar, East Java, the Philippines, and Banten were sailing to Moluccan ports to seek agricultural commodities (Andaya 1993). Like their European successors, these traders needed to establish and secure access to prized crops grown in remote village groves. During the sixteenth century, Portuguese, British, and Dutch traders also arrived, eager to establish monopolies on the Moluccan spice trade for European markets. The development of institutional control mechanisms, whether superimposed on already existing indigenous practices or invented by local native elites, traders, and, later, Dutch government officials, may have been driven by commercial opportunities. If this speculation is correct, then the codification of sasi customary law in Dutch and Malay-Ambonese texts becomes more easily understandable. These texts may have constituted attempts to control, codify, and commercially rationalize sasi customary law, practices, and institutions. At least one account from the island of Ambon in 1920 reveals a sasi institutional structure in which the proceeds of harvest auctions were used to pay for

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surveillance of agricultural territories under sasi and to provide salaries for resource monitors. This particular kind of sasi elaborated the arrangements for timing and manner of harvest and the rules for gathering, marking, and auctioning individual and clan-controlled crops that had been gathered into central warehouses. Prices for the yearly crops were negotiated and allocations made to distribute profits to individual and clan landowners. As in many villages practicing sasi today, the Siri Sori Serani rules of 1920 stipulated that the market price for the commodities sold from one sasi were negotiated at a meeting of local government officials, sasi and clan leaders, and elders. Apparently, portions of each year’s profits also were distributed to village government and religious institutions. Money obtained from the sale of certain sasi harvests occasionally was donated to the mosque or used to buy oil for the mesjid (Volker 1925). The elite leaders of Siri Sori Serani village elaborated one such arrangement during the early twentieth century: During the imposition of sasi, the rightful landlord is permitted to enter his own garden in order to clean up the grounds and to gather already ripened and fallen coconuts. He must take these to the village meeting place, where they are branded and stamped with the sign of his clan group and stockpiled. So I saw at the conclusion of the sasi-period almost the entire space under the village meeting place filled with piles of coconuts. (Volker 1925:299–300) The imposition of sasi in this particular village seems to have been initiated by a rural elite working in collaboration with a Dutch colonial official. A letter signed by leaders of this village to a local regent implores him to issue a “strong promise” reinforcing and further codifying sasi rules because local villagers apparently did not want to obey them. According to the letter, Because it is clear that we villagers pay little attention to sasi regulations which are usually implemented by us according to custom . . . apparently villagers do not yet understand that sasi regulations implemented under each rule will improve the lives of the inhabitants themselves, we request that this matter will hopefully be taken care of by Sir [the controlleur] through issuing new orders using a strong promise to confirm that this sasi is for the good of the inhabitants. (Volker 1925:301) In response to this collective request from local leaders and sasi enforcers for assistance, the regent issued a letter intended to strengthen villager compliance by regularizing and codifying sasi procedures, purposes, and penalties. His “strong promise” and new rules constituted an attempt to enforce sasi, to “fix this sasi for the lifetime of the inhabitants” (Volker 1925:307). In the past, as in the present, sasi presented problems of institutional design, compliance, and articulation with markets. In his letter, the regent stipulates that “in the event someone wants to buy or to contract the coconut sasi one year in advance” (Volker 1925:309), all the

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district officials, “old ones of the land” (Volker 1925:309), and young inhabitants are ordered to gather and meet on that issue. At one such meeting, the regent asked, Whoever wants to enter all his fertile coconut trees into the prohibition, his fruits will be channeled within the sasi, his fruits will never be stolen because the kewang officers have purchased them, [and] the prohibition will be guarded every day until the contract is finished. (Volker 1925:310) The lands of farmers who declared their coconut groves within that year’s sasi were monitored, patrolled, and protected by the kewang, aptly described by at least one Dutch official as the “bush police.” If the kewang discovered any villager other than the rightful owners within the protected groves, they were arrested, tried, shamed publicly, and fined. Fines levied on outsiders, whether nonlocal traders or villagers, were higher than those levied on local villagers. It is not at all clear that the common farmers and fisherfolk of local villages supported these sasi regulations. In Siri Sori Serani village, for example, not all coconut growers wished to participate in this scheme of community-enforced production and market access. The colonial official’s response to the letter sent by local leaders suggests that participation in market-oriented sasi in that one village may have been coerced: Whoever does not want to follow these “sasie” [sic] rules and does not want to sign his name to this letter, then that person will be viewed as a person who does not want to be governed and order[ed] and wants to use his own desires in a free manner only. (Volker 1925:307–308) The proceeds from agricultural lands entered within a particular yearly sasi were distributed according to various schemes. According to one scheme, the total amount of coconuts from an individual farmer’s or clan’s land was tallied and the coconuts marked. The proportional amount of profit due to individual farmers or clans, obtained from the proceeds of a collective auction of all crops sold to a particular trader in that year, was returned to them. In alternative arrangements, a certain percentage of profits from a particular sasi was allocated for the public good (for example, the purchase of lamp oil and a donation of cash for the Siri Sori Serani mosque). Administrative costs for imposition and implementation of the sasi were provided by allocating a share of each farmer’s coconut crop to the kewang, who thus had a direct incentive to guard the ripening coconuts under sasi, prevent theft, and convey the harvest to the village hall without loss or damage. In Siri Sori Serani village of 1920, for example, the chief kewang “receives onetenth of all gathered fruits” (Volker 1925:310). Whether designed, invented, or fused with previous religious practices, agricultural sasi, as practiced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Central Maluku Islands, apparently provided an institutional and legal framework

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in which the security of agricultural crops could be guaranteed for individual groves or collectively held areas. Ripening groves of coconuts, betel, and candlewood or kemiri nuts were protected from theft through the watchful eyes and mobile patrols of kewangs. Moreover, sasi institutions provided political and economic arrangements whereby individuals could coordinate their decisions—for example, to enter or not to enter into a particular sasi—through collective institutions. Although the equitable consequences of these relationships are not known, village-based sasi linked individual production to a larger market manifested by the yearly arrival of traders. Sasi arrangements allowed a forum for collective decisions on allocation of benefits to sasi officials, to individual cultivators, and for the collective good. T. Volker, a Dutch colonial legal observer, commented on the institutional benefits of sasi in 1921. His remarks anticipate the arguments and even the rhetorical strategies of contemporary common-property theorists and communitymanagement enthusiasts who extol the virtues of direct economic incentives to local communities. Explaining the purported benefits of sasi as a collective institution, Volker waxes enthusiastic: The young fruits remain on the trees and are not plucked before their prime, for whatever purposes. Because the kewangs have a stake in the outcome, the production is increased. They see to it that the grove renters keep their groves clean, and guard against harmful wild animals such as boars, badjings, and crawfish. It is more advantageous that a significant amount of fruit should be harvested in one fell swoop and taken en masse to be processed as copra. This [collective harvest and processing] insures that it will be traded in good quantities, and so that the proprietor can conduct a lively business with honest neighbors. This is better than selling the coconuts in increments of four and five fruits, or drying them and selling them to a Chinese for a few cents that are quickly spent. Thus, as a result of sasi, an entirely different situation comes to pass. The right of sasi is still an undervalued source of education, for the little peoples are, in general, still self-willed and pig-headed. Sasi brings with it a discipline that has an important educative element. (Volker 1925:300–301) The picture of sasi that emerges from Volker’s own account, as well as from the letter from an indigenous elite linked to and dependent upon the colonial enterprise, suggests that sasi, as practiced in the Central Maluku during the early twentieth century, was a set of institutional arrangements and rules based on statesponsored policing of productive areas. These arrangements implied control over harvesting, market negotiations for sale of the product, and allocational decisions. The implication that local elites, with the benign or possibly smug connivance of the Dutch regent, were imposing “discipline” on “self-willed, pig-headed little peoples” and manipulating local practices in the service of particular economic

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interests is also apparent. By the early twentieth century, and probably for decades before written records were produced, sasi was a changing, hybrid institution that arose in a border zone of intercultural contact, crosscutting interests, and competing claims on resources.

Sasi on the Seas: A Marine Common-Property Institution in Flux Sasi institutions and rules also regulated access to nearby marine environments in local coves, bays, and estuaries. Historical materials suggest that until the 1960s marine sasi regulations were far less differentiated and well developed than their agricultural counterparts. In the Central Maluku, markets for marine commodities apparently did not gain significance before the late 1950s or later. Moluccan coastal communities historically possessed well-defined marine territories under the control of particular villages. In the Central Maluku, these areas are known as petuanan laut, from the Malay tuan, or “owner,” and laut, which means “sea.” Lateral boundaries frequently are associated with natural features in the landscape, such as promontories or points. In Teluk Kau on Halmahera, according to Shalan, a young student who grew up in the area, an imaginary line between two promontories located on opposite sides of a cove 15 km deep and 40 wide constituted the boundary of a single village’s petuanan (Shalan 1991). While promontories often are regarded as the lateral boundaries of petuanan, the outermost edge of community-controlled waters is usually located at the juncture of coral reef and drop-off. The inshore waters under community control, from the low-tide line to the farthest edge of the reef (sometimes called “white water”), are known as meti in the Central Maluku. This area is scrupulously monitored during the imposition of sasi by the kewang, his assistants, and local villagers. Several island communities also claim and control rights over submerged atolls and underwater reefs, known locally as negeri tengelam (literally “submerged communities”), which may be several miles from the island on which the community is located. During the performance of sasi closure rituals, the boundaries of a marine petuanan are made visible and communicated. At the inception of the closing ceremonies, ritual practitioners carry incense and offerings of food to sacred places. These places may include the tips of promontories and points along the shoreline, as well as special places in the mountains believed to be inhabited by ancestral spirits. During the imposition of sasi on Ai Island in the Central Maluku, semipermanent ritual “trees” (lengths of wood crowned with a fringe of banana leaves and topped with a young coconut) are anchored offshore. With their fringe of banana leaves and coconut crown visible on the surface of the sea, these constructions function as a ritual sign of the sasi prohibition and a boundary marker signifying the outermost edge of the marine petuanan. Marine sasi has differed from land-based sasi in several ways. Unlike the variety of property regimes and rights-holding bodies that seem to have characterized

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agricultural sasi, local communities, rather than individuals, most commonly possessed ownership or control rights. In some coves, however, individuals were able to acquire rights to operate lift-net platforms or other gear in particular places. Also unlike agricultural sasi, which was deployed in the Central Maluku to regulate access to productive land and forest areas for subsistence and for commercial purposes, marine sasi, until very recently, only regulated access to the petuanan for subsistence purposes. With certain exceptions, marine petuanans were closed only during the arrival of schools of pelagic fish such as tuna and the thousands of lomba fish (Thrisina baelama) that yearly returned to the mouths of certain rivers for days at a time: The sea sasi and on the reef drop-off is implemented during that time of year when many fish migrate to the bays or into river mouths. If a fisherman discovers that the influx is beginning, he warns the village council as quickly as possible. . . . The kewang . . . sets a branch as a sasi symbol on the edge of the reef drop-off just in front of the place where the fish swim in. . . . After a couple of days, if there are enough fish in sufficient quantities in the signed places, the entire population ventures out in boats with nets, ropes, and driftnets. They hang out large sheets to drive the fish into the nets. The men break up into communal fishing parties. (Volker 1925:302) Prior to the 1950s or 1960s, marine sasi regulations focused on increasing hunting success and coordinating collective drives of fish that were temporary, possibly migratory residents of local bays and river mouths. When a school of fish entered a marine petuanan, the ocean kewang dived into the water and observed the movements of the school. Until the school settled down, he declared sasi closed, and no one, whether a local or an outside villager, was permitted to fish or enter the area. In Porto village, for example, only after this happened was sasi opened and a collective fish drive begun. In this regulated free-for-all, villagers’ access rights were equal, and each fisher’s share depended only on personal skill, luck, and position in the hunt. The few written rules concerning early marine sasi practices all relate to timing, equipment, and coordination of fish drives. They focus on maximizing the catch and minimizing the possibility of startling the fish and scattering them through disruptive behaviors (such as standing up in a boat) or the use of improper gear. As long ago as 1870, rules concerning marine sasi in Porto village stated that [w]hen schooling fish have just entered our harbor, no one may toss his net while standing in the water, and from time to time [it is forbidden] to use a redi, because these actions will panic the fish, they will not stay close to land and be accessible to people [trying to] net them. Whoever violates this rule, the person that stands up in his boat, he will be fined three rupiah and the [user of] the redi will be fined ten rupiah that will be placed in the village treasury. (Aponno 1977:20)

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Gear restrictions continue to play an important role in the Central Maluku today. In the spring of 1991, Shalan, a high school student, recalled that only certain kinds of scoop nets were permitted during fish drives within a bay along the jagged coast of Kau Bay on Halmahera Island: Everyone within the village is entitled to fish for any kind of fish within our bay. It is only when school fish enter the bay that strict prohibitions on timing of the drive, gear and behavior go into effect. If schooling fish are sighted by a local, they are reported to the saniri negeri [a kewanglike resource monitor] who goes out to observe them. If the saniri opens up sasi, then our fish drive begins. About forty boats from our village, each with a crew of four, paddle toward the school and surround them. They may not use motors and they may not use any other gear than scoop nets. As they surround the school, the fish are driven wild and into a panic. They try to escape from our circle of boats and in the process, they jump right into our scoop nets. (Shalan 1991) In the 1990s, on Saparua Island (see Map 4.2, page 82) as schooling fish swim to sea from an estuary they had entered, the kewangs of Porto village signal the relaxation of gear restrictions and the opening of sasi. In 1870, the marine kewang of Porto village (known as the laukewanno) also enforced regulations concerning the use of large nets that could close off an estuary or an entire cove. Fees levied on users of large gear provided the kewang with a salary and an incentive to perform his duties assiduously. In return, the kewang guarded the nets, prevented theft, and reduced conflict: Whoever uses a closed net (djarin tutop), when he wants to close [off] the cove in our land, must pay fifty cents each time to the community treasury so that the kewang can guard against other people entering the net and taking fish, at their whim, which causes conflict and curses with dirty words with the result that people make the Rajapatti dizzy and there is no tranquillity within the community. (Aponno 1977:20 –22) People who were foolish or avaricious enough to enter the area near these big nets during the temporarily closed-off time were fined: “Whoever dares to enter within [the area of the] closed net mentioned in article 86 without permission from the owner will be fined twenty five cents [that is deposited in] the community treasury” (Aponno 1977:20–21). Other rules from 1870 Porto prohibit the use of fish poison and prescribe sanctions for violators.

A Shift in Punishment Standards: From Shame to Money In the 1920s, if a man stole fruit from his own grove before sasi was opened, he might have been fined a block of white cloth, a bottle of palm wine, a gong, or a quantity of gold. If he stole from another person’s garden, however, he was not only fined but shamed:

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If a sasi transgressor in the community was found to have stolen something from another’s grove, then a completely different punishment is levied. Aside from the fine, he is punished as follows. If someone is caught red-handed who is clearly the thief, he is nabbed, stripped, and his body is wound round with young coconut leaves. . . . [He] is followed around by the drum beater, gong bangers, [gangs] of howling children and dragged through the community. He must then call out in the local language or [in] Malay: “Don’t steal like me, don’t steal like me.” In general people believed that the man wouldn’t live much longer. What was certain, even if he lived, was that life for him in his community or in neighboring communities was no longer possible or desirable. All honor was stripped from him. He was shamed in every sense of the word. (Volker 1925:301–302) While fishermen in 1991 recalled stories of violators being bound and shamed with the sasi sign who were forced to walk about the community shouting, “I have violated sasi!”, most punishments implemented today involve money. “People would no longer submit to being bound today,” explained a head of Nolloth village on Saparua Island. “They would find such a punishment intolerable” (Matatula 1991).

Changes in Marine Sasi, 1953–1991: A Market in Mollusks Prior to the 1960s, although reefs were within the boundaries of marine petuanans, few rules regulated access to reef fish or mollusks. Trochus niloticus, a reefresident mollusk, was gleaned freely from the shallow waters and reefs. The animal inhabiting the shell was extracted and eaten and the shells thrown away. During the 1960s, a commercial market developed for trochus shell, which is used to make paint pigments and a variety of ornamental items, including buttons, for East Asian markets in Taiwan and Japan as well as for European consumers (Reid 1992). From this beginning, and continuing through the 1970s and 1980s, trochus extracted from Central Moluccan reefs became the object of an international system of commerce linking local fishermen and fisherwomen, sasi institutions and laws, local-level government officials, marine commodities traders, and international exporters. The market for trochus has driven changes in the focus, structure, and operation of marine sasi institutions and practices for the last three decades. Historically, coastal fishing communities have been among Indonesia’s poorest peoples. Fishing, even when combined with agriculture in small gardens and swidden plots, is a notoriously risky way of making a living. In the Central Maluku, the rise of a commercial market in trochus created a window of economic opportunity for local traders on the islands of Ambon and Banda, village-level government officers searching for funds to supplement their cash-starved routine budgets, and local fishermen. During the early 1950s, merchants based on Banda

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Neira Island began buying trochus and other shell products from fishing communities on nearby Hatta, Ai, and Ran islands. At roughly the same time, merchants based on Ambon Island journeyed to Saparua, Haruku, and Ceram islands and began offering cash for trochus. Government officials soon realized that the sasi system offered an institutional and legal means to control the trochus harvest and its profits. In 1968, for example, Mr. Matatula, the village-level government head of Nolloth village (Saparua Island), issued a proclamation declaring the existence of a trochus sasi within community waters and asserted control of the sasi on behalf of local government (Matatula 1990; Matatula et al. 1990). The formerly “free” access of individual local families to the community-managed marine petuanan, he declared, was forevermore prohibited. Matatula’s unusually candid “History of the Trochus Sasi in Nolloth Village” states, Until 1968 . . . the trochus gathered even more attention, because the market became better and better by day. It was [in 1968] that the community was never again permitted to take trochus in a free manner. . . . [B]ased on the decision of the Government Body, all the income from the trochus must be allocated to all community needs and the Village Government generally and [this income] will not be permitted [to be used] for private [needs]. (1990:1) Indeed, by 1988 trochus exports were big business throughout Maluku Province. In a single year, the province’s total volume of shell exports tripled, from less than 80,000 kg in 1987 to more than 256,000 kg in 1988. From the shallow shelf and reef of Kei Besar, an island in southeastern Maluku Province, a total of 7.5 tons of trochus shell with an approximate value of US$65,000 was harvested in 1989 (Abrahamsz 1991). By 1991, trochus shell was selling for Rp16,750 (more than US$8) per kg. Governmental responses to trochus depletion throughout the Maluku, however, were far from uniform. At the same time that village-level governments began revising sasi in their own interest and asserting their control over community territories and revenues, higher-level government actors in Jakarta moved in different directions. In 1972, Decisional Letter of the Minister of Agriculture No. 327 already had declared Trochus niloticus a creature that “cannot be found” or is “rare” throughout Maluku Province (Soelaiman 1978:4). In 1987, as trochus extraction soared, the minister of forestry declared T. niloticus a protected species (MOF 1987). His decision meant that trochus harvests had become illegal. Ideas about conservation were emerging from the political center, in government ministries far from Moluccan shores. As prices and the pace of trochus extraction increased, the geographical extent of government-driven revisions of sasi, including reallocation of benefit streams and rights, spread throughout the Central Maluku. On Hatta Island, for example, rights to harvest reef-resident creatures, including trochus, remained open to all

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local residents before and after the late 1960s. In 1965, however, a village-level governmental regulation (MOF 1987) established that the village government was entitled to 6 percent of the total trochus harvest. The motives of the impoverished village head, who explained “that village government income in Hatta is derived solely from the trochus profits” (Saidjan 1991) were clear. By 1991, on Ai Island, several kilometers northwest of Hatta, the local government share of the trochus sasi was one shell out of every three harvested, or 33 percent of the entire reported harvest. In that same year, on Saparua Island, village governments in Porto and Paperu asserted or considered asserting government entitlement to 100 percent of the total trochus harvest; Nolloth’s government had staked its 100 percent claim as early as 1969. While the government share of the profits from trochus sasi varied widely from island to island, a relatively rapid, market-driven restructuring of the legal, economic, and institutional aspects of sasi clearly had occurred between 1970 and 1990. This restructuring was in the direction of centralization and control of access to reef areas and commodities in government hands. Developments in several communities on Saparua Island exemplify these changes. In 1990, for instance, a Nolloth village head issued another version of sasi regulations (Matatula et al. 1990). This entailed progressive seizure and tightening of governmental control over the marine sasi area through narrowly drawn regulations controlling the space and time regulations, as well as others specifying the behavior, identity, and gear of those permitted to enter the sasi area. These regulations, signed by four customary officials (the pakter, the kewang besar, the ukulima, and the ukulua) as well as by the government head (a former police officer), demonstrate how formal government has effected rapprochement and operational collaboration with customary authorities. Through government proclamation, sasi rules, roles, and institutions have been seized and squeezed in a progressively more centralized governmental embrace. Moreover, the language of the Nolloth regulations—legalistic, scientific, precise and bureaucratic, peppered with spatial coordinates and fixed on maps, numbers and alphabetized remarks—presents a striking contrast to the ritual speech, incense, and silent offerings of sasi ritual.

Consequences of a Revised Sasi: The Distributive Justice Question The social and economic consequences of governmental codifications and creative manipulations of the sasi system such as those implemented on Saparua Island in Nolloth, Porto, and Paperu villages are not yet clear. How do local villagers, sasi office holders, and government officers evaluate these dramatic changes? The question of distributive justice inevitably arises in assessing the consequences of increasing governmental control of sasi. In 1990, the Nolloth village head painted a positive image of these changes: Beginning in 1969 and continuing to the present day, management of trochus has developed progressively, in accordance with the growth of

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the world and our country, with the result that we, as Village Leaders, are always working and making strenuous efforts to provide guidance and explanations concerning village-level economic development generally, and trochus particularly, as well as various kinds of shells, coral, rocks, sand, gravel, decorative fish, and sea cucumber. (Matatula 1990:1–2) Nolloth’s village head points with pride to the material improvements in village life he has implemented with the proceeds from trochus sales. Since 1986, these have included the construction of a drainage ditch for expelling excess rainwater, a seawall, streetlamps, two wells, a village coconut grove, and two police posts. A village museum is now being built with sasi proceeds. In contrast, a fisherman from Paperu village, commenting on the rumored imposition of a 100 percent government monopolization of the trochus sasi in Porto village in 1991, strongly rejected the idea of government control of profits and key decisions on labor, timing, and gear: The sasi on schooling fish is an heirloom [pusaka] handed down from the grandfathers, while the sasi on sea cucumber and trochus is completely new and only began in 1989. I do not agree with what is being proposed in Porto village. The idea of a corporate village right [hak negeri], separate from the rights of individual families to fish and harvest in community waters, was never asserted before. In the old days, people made contributions, on a voluntary basis, to the village government or they gave privately, as families, to the Raja. (Kewang Paperu 1991) The same man, a respected marine kewang, focused on the potential for corruption and diversion of profits if village government succeeded in centralizing sasi administration and control of the economic flow it generates: If the Porto government controls all trochus rights, who knows how many trochus or sea cucumber will be gathered? Who knows who will make profits from those operations? People could get all kinds of hidden profits from this procedure, and steal our property for their private gain. We have an expression, “Small fish are eaten by the big ones.” It means that small people, the common people, who are like small fish, are eaten by the big ones, like the silvery Bobara’ fish. The common people may die making the big people rich. (Kewang Paperu 1991) Government assertion of control over sasi often means control of the identity of laborers (villagers or workers hired from outside), the bidding process through which marine commodity traders are selected as purchasers, the minimum price accepted per kg of shell, and the technologies and manner in which trochus is extracted. All of these decisions have allocational as well as environmental consequences that as yet are not clear. Private exporters as well as local governments also vie for control of inshore

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fisheries resources. In the southeastern Maluku islands Aru and Kei, Indonesian entrepreneurs based as far away as Bali have succeeded in acquiring rights to community-owned fishing grounds by advancing loans—for which the petuanan, or the right to harvest it, is given as security—to individual families during the monsoon season. Once indebted, many families transfer their rights to these entrepreneurs. In some communities, outsiders have acquired sole rights to harvest local marine resources, resulting in loss of local control of the community’s resource base. Recent studies from Aru and Kei document significant loss of income by local residents as a result of these transfers (Abrahamsz 1991; Khouw and Simatauw 1991).

A Crisis in Environmental Management? The rise of a market for trochus, in conjunction with widespread rural poverty in coastal communities and increased motorization of small craft, also may have generated a crisis in reef-resource management throughout the Maluku Islands (Reid 1992). In the inshore waters of many islands, trochus, mother-of-pearl, and other reef-resident species are being overexploited and depleted (Abrahamsz 1991; Reid 1992; Zerner 1991a, 1991b). Beginning in the 1960s, sasi prohibitions against harvest of trochus lasted from three to five years, a period sufficient to allow populations to mature and reproduce at least once (Kastoro 1991:22–23). As trochus prices have risen and local needs have increased, including those of fishing families and government offices, the interval between harvests has declined progressively on many islands. On some islands, divers are permitted to use scuba tanks to conduct the trochus harvest. Rapid motorization of small-scale Sulawesian craft has made it possible for local reefs to be depleted by roving crews of opportunistic fishermen from other islands (Reid 1992). The result of this constellation of developments is that Moluccan trochus stocks have been seriously depleted. On Saparua Island, for example, annual trochus harvests are yielding only 800 kg, whereas previous harvests on a three-year cycle were 3,000 to 4,000 kg (see Figure 4.1). During the Japanese occupation of Hatta Island in the 1940s and the immediate postwar confusion, trochus was not harvested for eight years; when harvesting resumed, in 1950, the yield was 30 tons. From 1950 through 1984, sasi was opened at two-year intervals on Hatta, with yearly yields of approximately 2 tons. Since 1984, sasi has been opened every year on Hatta, and yields are down to about 1 ton.

Marine Environmental Problems and the Cultural Construction of the Idea of Nature The causes of overexploitation are multiple and converging. In addition to local governmental needs for routine budget funds, the national government also has

Figure 4.1 YEAR Kilograms 1969 1972 1975 1978 1979 1980 1984 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990

4,250 4,100 3,950 3,800 3,650 3,500 3,350 3,200 3,050 2,900 2,750 2,600 2,450 2,300 2,150 2,000 1,850 1,700 1,550 1,400 1,250 1,100 950 800 650 500 350 200 50

Trochus shell yield management, Nolloth Village, 1969–1990.

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stimulated village-level competitions that exhaust local coffers and place additional pressure on extractive industries. But local governments are not the only nor invariably the primary source of pressure for trochus extraction. Rapidly rising consumer desires, stimulated by television images of a growing Indonesian middle class and its consumption patterns, are pushing local government and customary officials to shorten the interval between sasi harvests. Increased population densities on isolated Moluccan islands, in addition, are leading to increasing needs for alternative sources of income. Despite evidence that shortened intervals result in drastically decreased stocks, local officials claim that villagers’ need for income—to perform religious rituals, to pay school fees, and to acquire consumer goods—are forcing them to extend the harvest period. In response to a question about the decreasing interval between harvests, the village chief of Hatta replied, We open sasi so frequently now because there are more people on this island and making a living is very difficult. It is hard to make a living on this island. In order to meet the operational needs of the village and its inhabitants we must use village-wide auctions of the trochus harvest as well as sea cucumber. (Saidjan 1991) Although conventional community-based development narratives often demonize private-sector agents and government officials in analyzing the depletion of local environments, in the Maluku, and probably elsewhere, the story is more complex. Both government and private-sector actors may be exerting positive restraining influences on pressures toward overexploitation driven by local community desires. Private-sector trading companies that establish strict minimal size limits for acceptable trochus may discourage extraction of immature trochus indirectly. In some areas, local officials claim they have attempted to resist local villagers’ desires to shorten the interval between harvests: Local people do not understand ideas of sustaining the environment. They just want new things, good things, beautiful things. They are looking for their own happiness. From their perspective, the best way of getting a satisfactory life cheaply and easily is from a yearly auction of the trochus. I am convinced that we must lengthen the interval between trochus harvests to at least three or four years, but my community does not grasp why we need to limit harvests. (Matatula 1991) Local communities, moreover, may not grasp the need to limit harvests because their conceptions of the nature of the marine environment differ radically from contemporary